7. 8. 9. 10. Is it when Spring's first gale Comes forth to whisper where the violets lie? Thou art where billows foam, Thou art where music melts upon the air; Thou art around us in our peaceful home, And the world calls us forth,—and thou art there. Thou art where friend meets friend, Thou art where foe meets foe, and trumpets rend Leaves have their time to fall, And flowers to wither at the north wind's breath, Thou hast all seasons for thine own, oh, Death! EXERCISE CXXV. MORAL BEAUTY. VICTOR COUSIN. 1. Moral beauty comprises two distinct elements, equally, but diversely beautiful,—justice and charity, respect and love of men. He who expresses in his conduct justice and charity, accomplishes the most beautiful of all works; the good man is, in his way, the greatest of all artists. But what shall we say of Him who is the very substance of justice and the exhaustless source of love? 2. If our moral nature is beautiful, what must be the beauty of its Author! His justice and goodness are everywhere both in us and out of us. His justice is the moral order that no human law makes, that all human laws are forced to ex press, that is preserved and perpetuated in the world by its own force. Let us descend into ourselves, and consciousness will attest the Divine justice in the peace and contentment that accompany virtue, in the troubles and tortures that are the invariable punishments of vice and crime. 3. How many times, and with what eloquence, have men celebrated the indefatigable solicitude of Providence, its benefits everywhere manifest in the smallest as well as in the greatest phenomena of nature, which we forget so easily, because they have become so familiar to us, but which, on reflection, call forth our mingled admiration and gratitude, and proclaim a good God, full of love for his creatures! 4. God is the principle of the three orders of beauty,physical beauty, intellectual beauty, moral beauty. In Him, also, are re-united the two great forms of the beautiful, distributed in each of these three orders, to wit, the beautiful and the sublime. God is, par excellence, the Beautiful,-for what object satisfies more all our faculties, our reason, our imagination, our heart? He offers to reason the highest idea, beyond which it has nothing more to seek; to imagination the most ravishing contemplation; to the heart a sovereign object of love. 5. He is, then, perfectly beautiful; but is He not sublime, also, in other ways? If He extends the horizon of thought, it is to confound it in the abyss of His greatness. If the soul blooms at the spectacle of His goodness, has it not, also, reason to be affrighted at the idea of His justice, which is not less present to it? God is at once mild and terrible! 6. At the same time that He is the life, the light, the movement, the ineffable grace of visible and finite nature, He is, also, called the Eternal, the Invisible, the Infinite, the Absolute Unity, and the Being of beings. Do not these awful attributes, as certain as the first, produce, in the highest degree, in the imagination and the soul, that melancholy emotion excited by the sublíme? God is for us the type and source of the two great forms of beauty, because He is to us at once an impenetrable enigma, and still the clearest word that we are able to find for all enigmas. Limited beings as we are, we comprehend nothing in comparison with that which is without limits, and we are able to explain nothing without that same thing which is without limits. 8. By the being that we possess, we have some idea of the infinite being of God; by the nothingness that is in us, we lose ourselves in the being of God; and thus always forced to recur to Him, in order to explain any thing, and always thrown back within ourselves under the weight of His infinitude, we experience by turns, or rather at the same time, for this God who raises and casts us down, a sentiment of irresistible attraction and astonishment, not to say insurmountable terror, which He alone can cause and allay, because He alone is the unity of the sublime and the beautiful. EXERCISE CXXVI. HUMAN ACTIVITY WITHOUT LIMIT. VICTOR COUSIN. 1. Every thing has its end. This principle is as absolute as that which refers every event to a cause. Man has, therefore, an end. This end is revealed in all his thoughts, in all his ways, in all his sentiments, in all his life. Whatever he does, whatever he feels, whatever he thinks, he thinks upon the infinite, loves the infinite, tends to the infinite. 2. This need of the infinite is the mainspring of scientific curiosity, the principle of all discoveries. Love, also, stops and rests only there. On the route, it may experience lively joys; but a secret bitterness that is mingled with them, soon makes it feel their insufficiency and emptiness. Often, while igrant of its true object, it asks whence comes that fatal disenchantment, by which all its successes, all its pleasures, are successively extinguished. If it knew how to read itself, it would recognize, that, if nothing here below satisfies it, it is because its object is more elevated, because the true bourn after which it aspires, is infinite perfection. 3. Finally, like thought and love, human activity is without limits. Who can say where it shall stop? Behold this earth almost known. Soon another world will be necessary for us. Man is journeying toward the infinite, which is always receding before him, which he always pursues. He conceives it, he feels it, he bears it, thus to speak, in himself, -how should his end be elsewhere? Hence that unconquerable instinct of immortality, that universal hope of another life, to which all worships, all poesies, all traditions, bear wit ness. 4. We tend to the infinite with all our powers; death comes to interrupt the destiny that seeks its goal, and overtakes it unfinished. It is, therefore, likely that there is something after death, since, at death, nothing in us is terminated. Look at the flower that to-morrow will not be. To-day, at least, it is entirely developed; we can conceive nothing more beautiful of its kind; it has attained its perfection. My perfection, my moral perfection, that of which I have the clearest idea and the most invincible need, for which I feel that I am born,-in vain I call for it, in vain I labor for it; it escapes me, and leaves me only hope. Shall this hope be deceived? 5. All beings attain their end; should man alone not attain his? Should the greatest of creatures be the most illtreated? But a being that should remain incomplete and unfinished, that should not attain the end which all his instincts proclaim for him, would be a monster in the eternal order,—a problem much more difficult to solve, than the difculties which have been raised against the immortality of the soul. In our opinion, this tendency of all the desires and all the powers of the soul toward the infinite, elucidated by the principle of final causes, is a serious and important confirmation of the moral proof and the metaphysical proof of another life. EXERCISE CXXVII. HYMN TO THE SETTING SUN. G. P. R. JAMES. 1. (sl.) Slow, slow, mighty wanderer, sink to thy rest, As glorious go down to the ocean's warm breast, For all thou hast done, Since thy rising, O sun! May thou and thy Maker be blest. Thou hast scattered the night from thy broad golden way, Thou hast given us thy light through a long happy day, 2. Then slow, mighty wanderer, sink to thy rest, Slow, slow, mighty wanderer, sink to thy rest, One warm look of love on the earth's dewy breast, And to promise the time, When, awaking sublime, Thou shalt rush all refreshed from thy rest. Warm hopes drop, like dews, from thy life-giving hand, 3. Then slow, mighty wanderer, sink to thy rest, Slow, slow, mighty wanderer, sink to thy rest, |