dictation. We admire and learn, until we become drunken with these viands. Too soon we become devotees at the altar of science, we climb its heights, partake of its labours, and sit down at the table of its chieftains. We become at length satiated, and perceive the vanity of earthly science and its impotence to afford happiness. We again see the apparition of Deity, and return to the altar of beauty and holiness. The unchanged and unchangeable face of nature, its sun and moon, its stars, its mountains, its rivers, the unfathomable sea, again present themselves, and we dwell over them, regarding them as associates of our first love. We are led to examine our own fashion and being, and we discover assimilations of contour and shape which yield pleasing emotions. There we perceive the same line of beauty, which is the source of so much delight, whilst reflecting on the shape of the world, the fashion of the sun, the moon, and their starry children. We admire the structure of the various organs which minister to our existence, intelligence, and life; for we then recognize the same lines and shapes, which have yielded us so much pleasure in the heyday of our youth. The line of beauty is the line of life; the line of power and motion; the very perfection and being of beauty is expressed in the sphere or its features, which are curves: to behold it is to delight; and to describe its effect on our general nature demands a cultivated and unprejudiced mind. As we have said, beauty rests in her bower amidst the petals of the lily; high on the arched heaven; by the rocky shore where billows roll; surrounds the golden sun, and beams in the softer radiance of the moon; in the smile of childhood; in woman's form, and in the globe of sight. There she sits in majesty eternal, repeating in every age and clime,—"The light of the body is the eye."
