Page:Language of the Eye.djvu/144

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112
THE LANGUAGE

her ministers conspire to develop the life and glory of the grand emotions of the beautiful; they sit around their queen, and play on harps of heavenly note, which resound over mountain and valley, and in sweet songs they teach that beautiful objects must be in harmony with the whole economy of our nature, and that happiness is the state of feeling proper to the mind, when acting in concert with its own actual constitution. They tell that man's native right is to be happy; that in him there is a perennial spring of enjoyment, and all his search after, and reflections upon, beauty, are but the spirit's spontaneous suggestions, and the free outpourings of its nature. They teach man that he is surrounded by ties and alliances, which command his ardent affection and sympathy. They show that he is related to the physical world and its economy, which is ever creating agreeable or painful sensations; that the moral world and its economy, are exerting their influence on almost all his actions; that the Prince of the unseen world is ever appearing in the moral and physical world, and that these varied and august shadows of the Almighty evince to man that there is a beauty, awful and sublime, before which he must bow in love or in sorrow; that his obedience will lead to the intrinsic peace and harmonious activity of all his faculties. There is a voice, as from a silver trumpet, which seems to say:—"Thou, O man! live in harmony with the physical world, and health shall be thine; live in harmony with the economy of the moral world, and thou shalt wear virtue's chaplet; live in harmony with thy Divine relation, and thou shalt at last be wafted to Eternity's realms, where thou shalt bask in peace, and listen to the voices of angels and archangels chanting the praises of beauty. The soul then yearns for the visitation of true beauty on earth, and at last it shall be steeped in reverie and contemplation of eternal