Artistic pictures of such scenes are always attractive. But pictures or descriptions of feasts—where the design is not to satisfy a natural want, but where eating and drinking are made a luxurious art, the end of life, and man seems only an appendage to the table—are never wholly pleasing.
You feel a little ashamed of the quality of such delight. Even the marvellous pencil of Paul of Verona here fails to please. But a picture of men finding a joy in the higher senses, still more in thought, iu the common, every-day duties of life, in works of benevolence or justice, in the delight of love, in contemplation, or in prayer,—this can touch us all. We like the quality of such delight, and love to look on men in such a mood of joy. I need only refer to the most admired paintings of the great masters, Dutch or Italian, and to the poetry which chronicles the mortal modes of high delight. The spiritual element must subordinate the material, in order to make the sensual joy welcome to a nice eye. In the Saint Cecilia of Raphael, in Titian's Marriage at Cana, in Leonardo's Last Supper, it is the preponderance of spiritual over sensuous emotion that charms the eye. So is it in all poetry, from the feeding of the five thousand to the sweet story of Lorenzo and Jessica, and the moonlight scene of their love whereby "heaven is thick inlaid with patines of bright gold."
The joy of a New England miser, gloating over extortions which even the law would cough at, the delight of a tyrant clutching at power, of a Boston kidnapper griping some trembling slave, or counting out the price of blood which a wicked government bribes him withal,—that would hardly be acceptable even here and to-day,[1] though painted with the most angelic power and skill. It would be a painted satire, not a pictured praise; the portrait of a devil's joy can be no man's delight.
Everybody knows the joy of the senses. The higher faculties have a corresponding joy. As there is a scale of faculties ascending from the sense of touch and taste, the first developed and most widely spread in the world of living things, up to affection, rejoicing to delight, and to the religious emotions which consciously connect us with the Infinite God; so there is a corresponding scale of
- ↑ This sermon was preached, April 6, 1851, presently after the kidnapping of Mr Sims, in Boston, and before his "trial" was completed.
