I have read of a painter with disproportionately short legs, who, in all his pictures of human figures--from Moses down to the Mayor, done in heroic style--substituted his own legs. Your thorough utilitarian, deficient in imagination, his idea of mental symmetry being his own mental proportions, thinks no mind well balanced that has not a similar deficiency. He is a believer in nothing but the real and the useful--all else is stuff and nonsense; to him a mountain is a high elevation of land; a plain, a level tract; a forest, so much timber in a green state; a cloud, a collection of vapor. He sees in every thing just what there is in it and nothing more. Why does any one see more? It has been a puzzle to me, the undefinable longing I have sometimes felt in looking at a beautiful scene; a feeling akin to this, though lower, is that awakened by the fragrance of some flowers--it is so unsatisfactory, you wish to _taste_ them. These somethings bring up a shadow of 'shadowy recollections,' an echo of an echo of a past so indistinct, so dimly distant, that it seems to have been a part of another life. It may be that all earthly things are but types of spiritual things in a future spiritual existence--hence the yearning; or they may be expressions of spiritual things in a past spiritual existence--hence the 'shadowy recollections.' One thing is certain: all beauty and grandeur are faint expressions of the ideas of the All-Father; therefore, O utilitarian! you do wrong to ask of them: 'What use?' Better cultivate a taste for them, and with this taste an earnest desire to look into that Mind and read there thoughts of which Mont Blanc and the exquisite flowers are but feeble utterances. How the Great Teacher has lavished on us illustrations of his goodness, as if he would in some way make it plain to all, '_what use_.' There _must_ be a use in every thing he creates. Every dew-drop that the meanest weed has wooed and won from the atmosphere, is as tenderly cared for by him, as the stream is that supplies your mill-pond; every briny tear on the infant's cheek, as the ocean that bears on its bosom your merchant-vessels. What use? Have not some things been made useless--in your sense of the term--that they might be preserved from destruction? The gorgeous-plumed birds, and brightly-enameled fish of the tropics, are unfit for food--so, to your mind, of no use. I wonder if this holds good in cannibal countries; if so, it would be no protection to poor Molly O'Molly if she were there.