So then, draw we to an end; with feeble step and faltering, I follow beauty through the universe, and find her home Ubiquity: In all that God hath made, in all that man hath marred, Lingereth beauty, or its wreck, a broken mould and castings. And now, having wandered long time, freely and with desultory feet, To gather in the garden of the world a few fair sample flowers, With patient scrutinizing care let us cull the conclusion of their essence, And answer to the riddle of Zorobabel, Whence the might of beauty? Ugliness is native unto nothing, but an attribute of concrete evil; In everything created, at its worst, lurk the dregs of loveliness: We be fallen into utter depths, yet once we stood sublime, For man was made in perfect praise, his Maker's comely image: And so his new-born ill is spiced with older good, He carrieth with him, yea to crime, the withered limbs of beauty. Passions may be crooked generosities; the robber stealeth for his children; Murder was avenger of the innocent, or wiped out shame with blood. Many virtues, weighted by excess, sink among the vices; Many vices, amicably buoyed, float among the virtues. For, albeit sin is hate, a foul and bitter turpitude, As hurling back against the Giver all His gifts with insult, Still when concrete in the sinner, it will seem to partake of his attractions, And in seductive masquerade shall cloak its leprous skin; His broken lights of beauty shall illumine its utter black, And those refracted rays glitter on the hunch of its deformity. Verily the fancy may be false, yet hath it met me in my musings, (As expounding the pleasantness of pleasure, but no ways extenuating licence,) That even those yearnings after beauty, in wayward wanton youth, When, guileless of ulterior end, it craveth but to look upon the lovely, Seem like struggles of the soul, dimly remembering pre-existence, And feeling in its blindness for a long-lost god, to satisfy its longing; As if the sucking babe, tenderly mindful of his mother, Should pull a dragon's dugs, and drain the teats of poison. Our primal source was beauty, and we pant for it ever and again; But sin hath stopped the way with thorns; we turn aside, wander, and are lost. God, the undiluted good, is root and stock of beauty, And every child of reason drew his essence from that stem. Therefore, it is of intuition, an innate hankering for home, A sweet returning to the well, from which our spirit flowed, That we, unconscious of a cause, should bask these darkened souls In some poor relics of the light that blazed in primal beauty, And, even like as exiles of idolatry, should quaff from the cisterns of creation Stagnant draughts, for those fresh springs that rise in the Creator.