Of all arts, music is the one most intimately interwoven with the ethical consciousness of our own time. The oratorios of Handel and of Mendelssohn so blend the sacred text and the divine music, that we think of the two together, and almost as of things so wedded by God, that man must not seek to put them asunder. When I have sat to sing in the chorus of the Messiah, and have heard the tenor take up the sweet burden of "Comfort ye my people!" I have felt the whole chain of divine consolation which those historic words express, and which link the prophet of pre-Christian times to the saints and sinners of to-day. In far-off Palestine I have been shown the plain on which it is supposed that the shepherds were tending their flocks when the birth of the Messiah was announced to them. But as I turned my eyes to view it, my memory was full of that pastoral symphony of Handel's, in which the divine glory seems just muffled enough to be intelligible to our abrupt and hasty sense. Nay, I lately heard a beloved voice which read the chapter of Elijah's wonderful experiences in the wilderness. While I listened, bar after bar of Mendelssohn's music struck itself off in the resonant chamber of memory, and I thanked the Hebrew of our own time for giving the intensity of life to that mystical drama of insight and heroism. The transcendentalists of our own country made great account of the relation of art to ethics, and perhaps avenged the Puritan partiality by giving art the leading, and ethics the subordinate place in their statements and endeavors. But the masters of the transcendental philosophy in Europe did not so. Spinoza, Kant, and Fichte were idealists of the severest type. Standing for the moment between the two, I will only say that the danger of forgetting the high labors and rewards of thought in the pleasure of beautiful sights and sounds is one to which the highest civilization stands most exposed. To think aright, to resolve and pray aright, we must retire from those delights to the contemplation of that whose sublimity they can but faintly image, as we pass with joy from the likeness of our friend into his presence. Love of ornament is by no means synonymous with love of the beautiful. The taste which overloads dress and architecture with superfluous irrelevancies, is often quite in opposition to that true sense of beauty which is indispensable to the artist and precious to the philosopher. "[Greek: To kalon]," the Greeks said. Was it a naïve utterance on their part? Was it through their poverty of expression, or their want of experience, that the same word with them signified the good and the beautiful? No. It was through the depth of their insight, and the power of their mental appreciation, that they so stamped this golden word as that it should show the supreme of form on one of its faces, and the supreme of spirit on the other.