yet, even such, without raising at all the question how far they are consistent in it, will be playing their criticism every hour, on the defective sceneries, and the unsightly, disproportioned shapes of nature, showing that not even their superlatively tasteful religion is tasteful enough to satisfy their own ideals. They quite agree with us still, that no bog, or swamp, or heath, or desert, or dead plain, or stagnant water, no slimy reptile, or carrion bird is a beautiful object. They plainly do not think a howling wilderness at all comparable in beauty to a cultivated landscape; allowing without scruple, that nature from the hand of God requires to be retouched and finished by the hand of man. And whatever field of nature they find so drenched with water, or parched with drought, or pinched with cold, that no industry or art of man can improve it, they conceive to be unsightly, irredeemable waste. They have also what they call "foul days" and "nasty weather;" and when they are able to say "it is a perfect day," they mean that it is an exceptional, uncommon, superlative day. So far, we all agree, however much or little we have to say of the perfect beauty of nature. We discover disproportions and blemishes, we are annoyed by things distasteful, we suffer many disgusts. And we go so far in this involuntary criticism, that when we come to the human form itself, which is the noblest and choicest of all, we find no single member of the race that perfectly fulfils our ideas of beauty-not even our utmost conceit can look in the glass, without thinking of some feature that might be greatly improved. And we are even accustomed to assume, without scruple, that considering height, proportion of parts, perfection of single members, complexion, gait, posture, expression, no man or woman ever existed, in whom the practiced eye could discover no blemish-no excess, or defect, or false conjunction. Hence it is steadily assumed as a first maxim of art, that the perfect beauty is not, but is to be, created. We do not say that all are deformed, and yet with the single qualification, "more or less," it would hardly be an extravagance.

Some limb is awry, some member too long or too short, some feature too sharp or too clumsy. Indeed, the remarkable thing is that, conceiving man, as we do, to be created in the image of God, we meet so very few persons, in the intercourse of life, that awaken at all, our sense of beauty. We have, in fact, a way of saying that a person is common, as denoting an unattractive, badiy moulded figure and look.

I have been careful, it will be observed, in the making up of this picture, to give it in its softest, least exaggerated form. My object has not been to frame an impeachment of nature, but a respectful and suitably delicate representation rather. It would be easy to draw up specifications of scenes, and facts, and processes, that would make a hideously disagreeable, or even revolting picture, but the taste of one who should do it would probably suffer the principal infliction itself. It would be as when a Jumbo occupies whole years of industry in molding a circumstantial and minutely particular representation of the horrible and disgustting charnel made by the plague in the streets of Florence. It was bad enough that such a scene must be, as an event of Providence, but a great deal worse that any kind of art should labor at the picture, and work up the hideous details, by which it may be formally perpetuated. I prefer to take the milder, mildest possible conception of the uncomely and disgustful matters in the field of nature; for we shall have enough to do, in that case, to make out an account of them sufficiently agreeable to satisfy us.

Proceeding now in this endeavor, it will be necessary

I. To dispose of certain solutions, or pretended solutions, which are either not permissible, or do not reach the mark.

Thus it may be imagined that God does not like to be imprisoned in his own beauty, but prefers sometimes to assert his liberty, in creating things unshapely and wild; even as some human artist, who could easily conceive more beautiful things, chooses the less beautiful, with a

view to certain humorous and grotesque effects, or to certain moral effects that depend on acts of mercy to the lame, or leprous, or the outcast poor. But the point to be first noted here is that the artist is studying, nevertheless, in his choice, what will help him to command effects most beautiful, in the particular field or subject chosen. How far the dignity of God permits the supposition that he indulges the grotesque and dramatic by-play of sentiment in this way, need not here be discussed, for it is only a very small part of the unsightly and hideous deformities of nature that can, by any possibility, be classed in that manner. They are too disgustful and repulsive, too dreadfully serious, to be thought of as contributions for dramatic sentiment of any kind. Besides, the disgustful and hideous points of nature are not given pictorially, but really. If the artist were not painting lepers or lunatics, but creating them, we should have a very different impression of his work. No advantage, in short, is to be gotten by this kind of argument.

As little can it be said that there is no defect or blemish in nature, but only in our own standards, or ideals of beauty. What then are standards and ideals but just what they are made to be, save that evil must be allowed to have wrought some corruption of our judgments and perceptions under them. The same is to be said of all our perceptions. We have as good reason to confide in our judgments of what is beautiful, or unbeautiful, or disgusting, as we have to confide in our judgments of perspective and color. And we know as well what is out of shape, or hideous, or disgustful, as we do that the sky is blue, or that snow is white, or that righteousness is right. If we cannot trust our intuitive perceptions, there is nothing more for us to say. For aught that appears, disgusting odors are as good as perfumes, and deformities are the essence of beauty. As little can it be imagined, that our distates and condemnatory judgments are due to the lowness and perversity of our criticism; that we find blemishes because it pleases our conceit to find them; that we meet disgusting objects, because we

are fastidious enough to be disgusted by what is inherently beautiful; that we take a low-minded pleasure in gloating on deformities, and are too hasty, or shortsighted, to pierce the matters blamed, deeply enough to apprehend their real merit and dignity. Undoubtedly there is a possibility of just this perverse and nauseously absurd way of criticism. But when it is considered that all most rhapsodical admirers of nature, as well as all most rigid devotees of science, agree in the opinion that fault and blemish, and defect of color, and loathsomeness of look, are largely infused among the objects and scenes of nature, it will be as improbable as it can be, that all our disgusts are due to the distempers of our criticism.

Neither can it be said, with any sufficient show of evidence, that the uncomely and distorted forms of nature were never created, but have resulted, since the creation, from uses that produced the distortion; that the Zebra, for example, has lifted his shoulders and spun out his enormous length of neck, by the habit of browsing on tree-tops; or that the elephant, having the enormous weight of his head to support, at the end of a neck proportionably long, became weary of the burden, and gradually drew in his neck, till it was shortened; pushing out meantime the length of his mouth-piece, till it became a proboscis long enough to reach the ground, and gather his supplies of food. We have a strangely disfigured race of fishes, comprising the halibut, the plaice, and the flounder. They swim flatwise on their side, having their back-bone on one margin, and their belly on the other, and their head so far twisted out of place, that a single eye stands up prominent and bold on the top, and the other eye is a little, nearly extinct organ underneath. These creatures take their prey, it is said, by churning up the mud on the bottom of the ocean and letting it settle upon them for disguise, while they lie in perfect stillness under their thin cloak, waiting for some fish to be discovered, by their beetling eye, swimming directly over them. Then darting up their twisted mouth upon him, they have him for their

prey. Now the question springs, at this point, whether these strangely distorted and deformed creatures were made as they are, or whether they have twisted themselves out of all right figure by their practice? If there is some very special cunning given them for this practice, then they were so far made for it, and for all the disfigurements they incur from it. And if it is not so, and as good cunning is given to all the other fishes of prey, why has no other family of fishes learned to set their trap in the same way? On the whole, very little can be made of this kind of argument; and, partly for the reason that only a few of the malformations we meet have anything to do with such physiological practices. The jungles, the swamps, the deserts, the putrid lakes, are malformed plainly by creation, and fill a very much larger chapter.

But it will be said, and often is said, that the deformities and disgusts of nature are all invented as reliefs to set off the ornamentations and beauties. As there must be discords in music, light and shade in pictures, so there must be contrasts in order to make up any really perfect landscape, or perfectly composed beauty in things not pertaining to landscape. This is really the most plausible account that can be given of the disfigured and distasteful things in nature. But there is no solid merit of reason in the solution, as we can easily see. Does any artist ever execute one corner of his picture badly, in order to bring out the beauty of his work in the other? What painter ever put a swamp or a desert in his picture, to heighten the pleasing effect of it? Such a thing may have been done, as all absurd things can be, but I happen never to have seen, the instance. A reedy lake, or wide-spread shallow, such as the muskrat populations love to inhabit-who ever undertook to set off his landscape by putting it in the foreground, or middle ground, or anywhere else? What sculptor ever thought to make a leg or an arm more beautiful, by setting a deformed one with it, as we often see in the juxtapositions of nature? The need of contrasts in setting off the charms of things beautiful, is itself a false assump

tion. ful.

Such contrasts are commonly painA park and a swamp, a group made up of hags and graces, gambols of life and decays of death-all such misconjunctions are offensive. Light and shade are a wholly different matter, operating not by contrast, but by the magic power of the sun, playing out, in both alike, the forms and colors of the scene it is painting. Things unlike, as rock and water, complement each other, not by contrast, but by joint contributions of beauty. Meantime all the unbeautiful stuff the world contains has abundance of contrasts in it; only it happens that they are so devoid of expression, as to be simply wearisome because of their commonness. Whole regions are too common to raise any thought of a landscape. Farms and localities are common. Multitudes of faces, abundantly unlike, are yet so meagre, and dry, and dreary, that we call them common, and let them go. But it cannot be imagined that these commonnesses help, as terms of contrast, to garnish any larger whole. They only whet our appetite for something better by starving us in what they are.

Dismissing, then, all attempts to solve the deformities and disgustful things of nature, on the footing of mere natural criticism, we come

II. To what is really the chief point of their significance, the moral uses they are fitted and appointed to serve.

And the first of these I name is the broad, everywhere visible, token of retribution they show imprinted on the world. I do not undertake to say, that all these unsightly and disgustful things are deformities actually caused by the fact of wrong or transgression, appearing for the first time after it. The world was originally made, no doubt, for the occupant, to serve such uses as his moral training would require; and if it was preluding his bad history long before he came, the disgustful tokens were none the less truly fruits of his wrong, than if they had appeared only afterwards, as the literal effects of it. The medicines a traveler carries with him, when going into regions infested with plague, are none the less