‘It would be easy to show that the sense of beauty does not spring from any amount of comfort; but I do not care to pursue the argument from that starting-point.--I confess when you have once waked the questioning spirit, and I look up at the clouds and the stars with what I may call sharpened eyes--eyes, that is, which assert their seeing, and so render themselves incapable for the time of submitting to impressions, I am as blind as any Sadducee could desire. I see blue, and white, and gold, and, in short, a tent-roof somewhat ornate. I dare say if I were in a miserable mood, having been deceived and disappointed like Hamlet, I should with him see there nothing but a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours. But I know that when I am passive to its powers, I am aware of a presence altogether different--of a something at once soothing and elevating, powerful to move shame--even contrition and the desire of amendment.’ ‘Yes, yes,’ said Charley hastily. ‘But let me suppose further--and, perhaps you will allow, better--that this blueness--I take a part for the whole--belongs essentially and of necessity to the atmosphere, itself so essential to our physical life; suppose also that this blue has essential relation to our spiritual nature--taking for the moment our spiritual nature for granted--suppose, in a word, all nature so related, not only to our physical but to our spiritual nature, that it and we form an organic whole full of action and reaction between the parts--would that satisfy you? Would it enable you to look on the sky this night with absolute pleasure? would you want nothing more?’ I thought for a little before I answered. ‘No, Charley,’ I said at last--‘it would not satisfy me. For it would indicate that beauty might be, after all, but the projection of my own mind--the name I gave to a harmony between that around me and that within me. There would then be nothing absolute in beauty. There would be no such thing in itself. It would exist only as a phase of me when I was in a certain mood; and when I was earthly-minded, passionate, or troubled, it would be _no_where. But in my best moods I feel that in nature lies the form and fashion of a peace and grandeur so much beyond anything in me, that they rouse the sense of poverty and incompleteness and blame in the want of them.’ ‘Do you perceive whither you are leading yourself?’ ‘I would rather hear you say.’ ‘To this then--that the peace and grandeur of which you speak must be a mere accident, therefore an unreality and pure _appearance_, or the outcome and representation of a peace and grandeur which, not to be found in us, yet exist, and make use of this frame of things to set forth and manifest themselves in order that we may recognize and desire them.’ ‘Granted--heartily.’