borne through the streets of the Heavenly City by saints and angels, will the artist suffer thy snowy folds to be dragged through the mire of crime? Shame to him when he dallies in the Circean Hall of the senses! Infamy when he wallows in the sty of sensuality! The effort to apprehend and reproduce the Supernal Loveliness on the part of souls fittingly constituted so to do, has given to our race all the marvels, the softening and elevating influences of the Ideal Realm. The purest, the most exciting, the most intense pleasure is to be found in the _pure_ contemplation of Beauty. We may indulge in it without fear--no Hock and soda are required after its safe excitements! In this contemplation alone do we find it possible to attain that pleasurable elevation, _that excitement of the soul_, which we recognize as always dependent upon our introduction into the Realm of the Ideal. This excitement of the _soul_ is easily distinguished from the excitement of the _mind_ consequent upon the perception of logical truths, the satisfaction of the reason; or from passion, the excitement of the _heart_. The excitement of the _soul_ is strictly and simply the temporary satisfaction of the human aspiration for the Supernal Beauty; and is quite independent of the search for finite truths for the gratification of the _intellect_; or of that of passion, which is the intoxication of the _heart_. For in regard to passion of the heart, its home lies too near the senses to be entirely safe, and its tendency may be to degrade;--while there may be high and useful truths which do not move the _soul_ in the least. The arts, then, always occupied with the reproduction of Beauty, gain their power over the soul of man by reminding him of the Divine Attributes. His thirst for the beautiful belongs to his immortality, for it never rests in the appreciation of mere finite beauty, but struggles wildly to obtain the Beauty above. Inspired by an ecstatic prescience of the glories beyond the grave, we struggle, by multiform combinations among the things and thoughts of time, to attain a portion of that loveliness whose elements pertain to Eternity alone; and thus, when by poetry or music, the most entrancing of the poetic moods, we find ourselves melted into tears, we are not moved through any excess of pleasure, but through an impatient sorrow at our inability to grasp _now, wholly, here on earth_, those divine and rapturous joys of which, through the poem or through the music, we obtain but brief and indeterminate glimpses: 'Tears, idle tears, we know not whence they're flowing, Tears from the depths of some _divine despair_.' Tears of the created, the finite, for the Creator, the Infinite!