Any attempt to answer the first question, and to explain what is Beauty, would involve a long discussion, perhaps not a very profitable one. At any rate it would lead me far from my present purpose. This only may be said in passing. Light, as physicists inform us, is not something which exists in itself apart from any sentient being. The external reality is not light, but the motion of certain particles, which, when they impinge on the eye, and have been conveyed along the visual nerve to the brain, are felt by the mind as light,—result in the perception of light. Light, therefore, is not a purely objective thing, but is something produced by the meeting of certain outward motions with a perceiving mind. Again, certain vibrations of the air striking on the drum of the ear, and communicated by the nerve of hearing to the brain, result in the perception of sound. Sound, therefore, is not a purely objective entity, but is a result that requires to its production the meeting of an outward vibration with a hearing mind; it is the result of the joint action of these two elements. In a similar way, certain qualities of outward objects, certain combinations of laws in the material world, when apprehended by the soul through its æsthetic and imaginative faculties, result in the perception of what we call Beauty. Therefore Beauty, neither wholly without us nor wholly within us, is a product resulting from the meeting of certain qualities of the outward world with a sensitive and imaginative soul. The combination of both of these elements is requisite to its existence. It is no merely mental or subjective thing, born of association, and depending on individual caprice, as the Scotch philosophers so long fancied. When the two elements necessary to the perception of it have met, it is a reality as inevitable and as veritable as the law of gravitation, or any law which science registers. And when, either through our own perception, or through the teaching of the poets, we learn to apprehend it—when it has found entrance into us, through eye and ear, imagination and emotion, we have learnt something more about the world in which we dwell than Physics have taught us,—a new truth of the material universe has reached us through the imagination, not through the scientific or logical faculty.