_Man not the highest Type of Beauty._--Is then the human form the highest expression of the principle of beauty? It can hardly be; for in man, as in all things on the earth, is mingled along with the beauty much that is deformed, with the excellence much imperfection. We can conceive forms superior to his, faces radiant with a beauty that sin has never darkened, nor passion nor sorrow dimmed. We can conceive forms of beauty more perfect, purer, brighter, loftier than any thing that human eye hath seen or human ear heard. We conceive them, however, as existing only under some sensible form, as manifest in some way to sense, and the beauty with which we invest them is the beauty of the spiritual expressing itself in the outward and visible. It is the province of imagination to fashion these conceptions, and of art to attempt their realization. This, the poet, the painter, the sculptor, the architect, the orator, each in his way, is ever striving to do, to present under sensible forms, the ideal of a more perfect loveliness and excellence than the actual world affords. This ideal can never be adequately and fully represented. The perfection of beauty dwells alone with God. _Consideration in favor of the Theory now explained._--It is in favor of the theory now under consideration, that it seems thus more nearly to meet and account for the various phenomena of beauty, than any other of those which have passed under our review, and that it accounts for them, withal, on a principle so simple and obvious. The crystal, the violet, the graceful spreading elm, the drooping willow, the statue, the painting, the musical composition, the grand cathedral, whatever in nature, whatever in art is beautiful, all mean something, all express something, and in this lies their beauty; and we are moved by them, because we, who have a soul, and in whom the spiritual nature predominates, can understand and sympathize with that which these forms of nature and art, in their semi-articulate way, seem all striving to express. _The Ideas thus expressed pertain not to Nature but to the divine Mind._--It is not necessary that, with the ancient Greeks, we should conceive of nature, as having herself an intelligent soul of these forms as themselves conscious of their own meaning and beauty. It is enough that we recognize them as conveying a sentiment and meaning not their own, but his who made them, and made them representative and expressive of his own beautiful thought. Words are not the only modes of expression. The soul speaks more earnestly and eloquently often in signs than in words. And when God speaks to men, he does it not always in the barren forms of human speech, but in the flower that he places by my path, in the tree, the mountain, the rolling ocean, the azure firmament. These are his _words_, and they are beautiful, and, when he will, they are terrible. Happy he who, in all these manifestations, recognizes the voice of God.