38
now pervades the profession, the accomplishment of which would, I apprehend, be a less difficult task than many would suppose.
By taste, I mean simply the power of appreciating beauty in any form, whether in nature or in art, and the cultivation of which, forms, I conceive, an important and a valuable substitute for more profound pursuits, but to which it may be superadded, with still greater advantage to its possessor. Good taste and good feeling are found in daily companion- ship with each other, and without its development in some shape or other, a blank is left in the circle of man’s most refined enjoyments, while even his intellectual frame-work is incomplete, and mutilated. For men are differently gifted, both as regards their sensibility and their taste. One man delights in the simple beauty of a flower, and expatiates with earnestness on its form and colours, a source of beauty quite distinct from that of its organisation; while another observes the same object with indifference.
I do not presume to enter into any definition of the nature of the beautiful, its essence or its source; but I will venture to assert, that its study forms one of the most elegant resources of our minds, by enlarging the number of our intellectual pleasures ; and in no direction can the mind, pre- occupied by the responsible and active duties of our profes- sion, expand more pleasingly or more profitably for the happiness of its possessor, than in that, which opens to its sense of admiration, the beauty of nature and of art.
This interesting study embraces a wide range of human knowledge, from its primitive form, exhibited in the sensa- tions of pleasure that reach the heart from the perception of
