of seeing and hearing there is likewise a certain but imperceptible contact of the nerves of the eye and ear with the waves of light and the undulations of the air; but still this contact is of a different kind from the former, and of another and indeed of a higher nature, producing the relations of tone, color, and shape. Now, in this classification, the eye is the mind or spirit’s sense for beauty of form and grace of motion. It is so in truth, not merely in those who are endowed with a taste for the arts or the artistic eye, but far more universally, being diffused in a greater or less degree through the whole human family. Special gifts of it, or, rather, higher though varying endowments, are to be found in some highly-favored individuals; and in the same way the ear for music is not imparted to all who possess the general organ of hearing, which we very properly term the soul’s sense. The external senses man shares, indeed, in common with the brutes, in some of whom they are found of an exquisite and highly-developed susceptibility. But these higher endowments of eye and ear, and above all the natural artistic feeling for beauty of form, and the musical talent, are the prerogatives of man, conferred upon him by his peculiar faculty of fancy. On this account they, like that faculty, are distributed unequally among men, though they are not on that account less real and undeniable. The brutes, I said, do not possess them. No doubt there is a certain melodious rhythm perceptible in the songs of birds. Some, also, of the more eminently docile and sagacious of terrestial animals do indeed evince peculiar signs of pleasure in the music of man. Still I would call this but so many single, unconnected echoes or reverberations of fancy, since every thing like free choice, further development, or intrinsic coherence, is wanting to them--all is broken, abrupt, and incapable of being formed into a whole. In the same manner the artistic instinct and skill of some animals exhibits, no doubt, a certain likeness in its operations to the rational works of man, but still it ever remains a resemblance at best, and is forever divided from reason by a wide and impassable gulf. It is, as it were, the indistinct trace of a weather-worn and nearly obliterated inscription--the dying notes of some far-off music. And hence the agreeable, but, at the same time, melancholy, impression which such things make upon our feelings. A something human seems to be stirring in them. They appear to revive a faint but nearly-forgotten allusion to an originally close and intrinsic relation between animated nature in its highest developments and man as its former master and as the divinely-appointed lord of the whole earthly creation. But if the influence and the operation of the fancy on the external senses be thus indistinct and difficult to be traced, it is far more apparent, as also far greater and more decided, on the