I shall not make this chapter an essay on the sublime and beautiful, nor seek to analyse the sense of beauty. It is enough that it is an appetite of our being, and that most abundantly in nature, on every side, there is the material of its gratification. So abundantly, indeed, that it were easy to expand the few pages which I propose to devote to the subject into a volume, or a dozen volumes, and yet leave untouched vast treasures of the beautiful in natural history. I must content myself and my readers with the selection of a few of the more prominent objects in which this sense is gratified, and with a discrimination of two or three distinct phases or conditions of existence which contribute, each in its measure, to give delight to the eyes. [Illustration: ANTELOPES.] Among Quadrupeds, there is perhaps less of beauty, strictly considered, than in most other classes of animals. Elegance of form, however, which is one phase of it, is seen in the lithe and active squirrel, the pretty petaurist, and many other of the smaller beasties, and is found in perfection in the deer and antelopes. Who that has seen a pet fawn coming to be caressed by a fair girl, but must have had his sense of the beautiful gratified? Mark the freedom and grace of every motion! See how it stretches out its pretty meek face and taper neck towards the hand; its extreme timidity causing its whole body and every limb to start on the slightest stir from the beholders, while on the least approach it bounds away in the exuberant playfulness of its little heart, then stops, and turns, and gazes, and stretches out its neck again! See when it trots or walks, how high it lifts its little slender feet, bending its agile limbs as if motion itself were a pleasure! See, as it stands, with one fore-foot bent up, the hoof nearly touching the belly; the long graceful ears moving this way and that, now thrown forwards, now backwards, now erected, to catch the slightest sound,--what a picture of fairy grace it is! There is beauty, too, in the soft, full liquid eye of these animals,--the "bright, black eye" of the "dear gazelle," which in the East is the very ideal of female loveliness. Its melting gaze seems full of tenderness, so that we cannot look without loving it. Nor is beauty of colour wholly wanting. How rich is the tawny fur of the tiger, dashed with its black streaks! And the brighter yellow of the leopard and the jaguar, studded all over with rosettes of black spots! We forget the ferocity of the savage in its beautifully-painted coat. The zebra, too,--with the fine contrast of those bands of richest sable on the cream-coloured ground, now bold and broad, as on the rounded body, now running in fine parallel but irregularly-waved lines, as on the face,--is a beautiful quadruped; and a herd of them galloping wantonly over a South African plain, must be a sight worth seeing indeed.