The world is full of beauty, but as it were hinted,--as in the tendency to make the most conspicuous things the most beautiful, as flowers, fruits, birds, the insects of the sunshine, the fishes of the surface, the upper side of the leaf; and perhaps more distinctly (in accordance with Lord Bacon's suggestion that "Nature is rather busy not to err, than in labor to produce excellency") in the tendency to hide those that are ugly, as toads, owls, bats, worms, insects that flee the light, the fishes of the bottom, the intestines of animals. But these are hints only, and Nature, as Mr. Ruskin confesses, will sometimes introduce "not ugliness only, but ugliness in the wrong place." Were beauty the aim, it should be most evident in her chief products; whereas it is in things transient, minute, subordinate,--flowers, snow-flakes, the microscopic details of structure,--that it meets us most invariably, rather than in the higher animals or in man. Nor in man does it keep pace with his civilization, but obeys laws that belong to the lower regions of his nature. This ambiguity of every fact in Nature comes from the difficulty of detecting its true connection. There is reality _there_, even in blight and corruption; something is forwarded, only perhaps not the thing before us,--as the virtue of the compost-heap appears not in it, but in the rose-bed. The artist cannot forego a jot of reality, but the obvious facts are not this, any more than the canvas and the pigment are the picture. The prose of every-day life is reality in fragments,--the Alps split into paving-stones,--Achilles with a cold in the head. Seen in due connection, they make up the reality; but their prominence as they occur is casual and shifting, and the result dependent on the spectator's power of discerning, amid the endless series in which they are involved, more or less of their vital relations.