lens which cannot be too transparent; but in the higher service to fine art, language is rather a mosaic window of stained glass which both absorbs and transmits light, which both conceals and reveals, which we look at as well as through. In literary art or style, language has a value of beauty for itself alone, as well as a value of use as a means of communication. But the root of style is in emotion; it is as expression of emotion, and in the main of one kind of emotion, that language rises to style. All emotions influence language expression, and any one may, under certain conditions, lead towards literary art; there is an eloquence of wrath and of fear, of hate and of love, and these emotions may induce artistic creativeness in written language; but the main impulse to art is in the feeling for beauty _per se_. This is a certain mode of emotional delight which every one who has felt it knows at once in its quality as quite distinct as a psychic mode. How literary style rises and falls with æsthetic emotion might be exemplified by a wide range of quotations, but an example or two must suffice. This, from one of Shelley’s letters, will, I trust, illustrate the point:— “MY DEAR P——, I wrote to you the day before our departure from Naples. We came by slow journeys, with our own horses, to Rome, resting one day at Mola di Gaeta, at the inn called Villa di Cicerone—from being built on the ruins of his villa, whose immense substructions overhang the sea, and are scattered among the orange groves. Nothing can be lovelier than the scene from the terraces of the inn. On one side precipitous mountains whose bases slope into an inclined plane of olive and orange copses, the latter forming, as it were, an emerald sky of leaves, starred with innumerable globes of their ripening fruit, whose rich splendour contrasted with the deep green foliage; on the other the sea, bounded on one side by the antique town of Gaeta, and the other by what appears to be an island, the promontory of Circe. From Gaeta to Terracina the whole scenery is of the most sublime character. At Terracina precipitous conical crags of immense height shoot into the sky and overhang the sea. At Albano we arrived again in sight of Rome. Arches after arches in unending lines stretching across the uninhabited wilderness, the blue defined line of the mountains seen between them, masses of nameless ruin standing like rocks out of the plain, and the plain itself, with its billowy and unequal surface, announced the neighbourhood of Rome. And what shall I say to you of Rome? If I speak of the inanimate ruins, the rude stones piled upon stones which are the sepulchres of the fame of those who once arrayed them with the beauty which has faded, will you believe me insensible to the vital, the almost breathing creations of genius yet subsisting in their perfection?”