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The Love of the Beautiful.
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notonous round of petty solicitudes, out of the mire of commonplace cares which so quickly destroy the freshness of the spirit; they fill the mind, through the eye, with elevating images, with visions of serener realms, until the clamor and tumult of this world sound afar off. Thus inspired, Art shares Nature's glory when she achieves the beautiful, and lays the offering upon a Heaven-dedicated altar.

There is a class of beings who seem especially gifted with beautifying eyes,

"With prompt embrace all beauty to enfold."

They have an unconscious power of idealizing whatever they look upon in nature, in art, in humanity. They deck the granite hardness of reality with the tender and clinging ivy of sentiment, and cover the sharp angles of bare facts with the velvety mosses of imagination. With them there is ever an under-current of poetry flowing beneath life's turgid stream of tritest prose. They are the world's true poets, though perchance, they cannot lay claim to the smallest foothold of territory in Parnasus, and have never been impelled by the stirring of the "divine afflatus," to pen an inspiration. They are they true artists, though they paint no pictures, for they have the artist-instinct throbbing within, and a living panorama of graceful forms, symmetrical outlines, and glorious scenes is