The aesthetic faculty, awakened as it is by the natural response of man's perceptions to the harmonies of existence, to the spontaneous coherency of its many parts in a united whole, and stimulated by the creative work of human art, which moulds even the naturally discordant or unconnected into a concordant expression (sometimes it may be, as in handicraft, only to satisfy human needs), lifts us above the imperfections and fragmentariness of things, above our selfish interest in them, into a frame of mind where they are seen whole and perfect, and yet one and veritably individual. In its supreme or comprehensive phase it does not deal merely with the beautiful, nor merely with the beautiful and sublime. All true art, whether it awakes awe or admiration, laughter or tears, whether it melts the soul, or steels it to endurance, has a common characteristic; and that is to raise the single instance, the prosaic or commonplace fact, into its universal, eternal, infinite significance. It frees the fact from the limitations which our distractions, our practicality, our temporary hopes and fears, have deeply stamped upon it. It is still, after art has dealt with it, to all appearance a single fact: but it now has the universe behind it and within it. It carries us away from the incompleteness, the pressure of externals, the solicitude for the future and the regrets for the past, into a self-contained, self-satisfying totality, into freedom and leisure, rest which is not stolid, and action which involves no toil. Such a result is partly, as was said, the gift of common nature, which speaks peace, comfort, joy, self-possessed fruition for all her children when their sense is open and free: partly it comes through those select ones among these children who have a larger perception of the meaning and inner truth of her works, and who can by a sensible reconstruction, which if it is fair and successful will only bring out more clearly the unity and harmony which deeper insight detects, help others to see and enjoy what they have felt and rejoiced over. Such are the poets--in the widest sense--the makers, the seers, who in verse, in music, in picture and sculpture--who, in human lives, it may be even in the conduct of their own, show us how divine a thing is nature and humanity: show us the secret and unheard harmonies that to the full-opened ear absorb and transmute the lower discords of life and vulgar reality. It is they who give immortality and divinity, who make heroes and demigods[11]. Or, if they may not be said to make them, they half-reveal and half-construct the ideal figures which stand high and beneficent in the history of the world. And by those who thus half-construct, and half-reveal, are meant not merely the single artists in whom the process culminates to final outline and publicity, but the many-voiced poesy of the collective human heart which out of its myriad elemental springs constitutes the total figure, the august