“Why knows the nightingale to sing? Why flows the pine’s nectareous juice? Why shines with paint the linnet’s wing? For sustenance alone? for use? For preservation?”... An art-poet significantly and suggestively writes, in lines to which the contributory reader, must, on his part, supply readings as it were between the lines: “This wild white rose-bud in my hand hath meanings meant for me alone, Which no one else can understand: to you it breathes with altered tone; How shall I class its properties for you? or its wise whisperings Interpret? Other eyes and ears it teaches many other things.” The dull of hearing and seeing, it teaches very little. Josiah the curate, in Colonel Hamley’s tale, finds nothing suggestive in a rose in a buttonhole—not that he lacks interest in the flower in what he thinks its proper place. He never, he owns, could see any possible affinity between flowers and broadcloth; and why people should pluck blossoms from the stems and leaves that harmonize so well with them, to stick them into a dingy produce of the loom, he holds to be one of the puzzles of humanity. But Josiah is indulgent to that sister Rosa of his, who confessedly resembles the lilies in so far that she toils not, neither does she spin; and who, idle child, seems to think human beings ought to be content with merely blooming. We like our churches to be beautiful, and our temples, and our whole symbolic creations, Mr. Hannay somewhere observes; their beauty represents the general beauty of the universe, and that is one of the modes by which God is pleased to appeal to our faculties of love and wonder and admiration. “The Romanists call the Virgin Mary a ‘mystical rose,’ and a beautiful woman is a mystical rose; attractive, and yet, at the same time, a religious symbol—an object which keeps alive in you the sense of wonder and love of beauty, and thankfulness to the Supreme for the glories of His creation.” It has been said by an art-poet already quoted, that “the girl who twines in her soft hair the orange-flower, with love’s devotion, by the mere act of being fair, sets countless laws of life in motion.” Dr. Croly, in his “Salathiel,” pleading for the _right_ of beauty to have a natural power over the heart, urges, for instance, that all that overcomes selfishness—the besetting sin of the world—is an instrument of good; and goes on to say that beauty is but melody of a higher kind—both alike softening the troubled and hard nature of man. “Even if we looked on a lovely woman but as on a rose, an exquisite production of the summer hours of life, it would be idle to deny her influence in making even those summer hours sweeter.” We may apply the suggestion in one of Mrs. Browning’s last poems— “What if God has set her here Less for action than for Being?— For the eye and for the ear. “Just to show what beauty may, Just to prove what music can.” _A HISTRIONIC ASPECT OF LIFE._