We like our churches to be beautiful, and our temples, and our whole symbolic creations, Mr. Hannay somewhere observes; their beauty represents the general beauty of the universe, and that is one of the modes by which God is pleased to appeal to our faculties of love and wonder and admiration. “The Romanists call the Virgin Mary a ‘mystical rose,’ and a beautiful woman is a mystical rose; attractive, and yet, at the same time, a religious symbol—an object which keeps alive in you the sense of wonder and love of beauty, and thankfulness to the Supreme for the glories of His creation.”
It has been said by an art-poet already quoted, that “the girl who twines in her soft hair the orange-flower, with love’s devotion, by the mere act of being fair, sets countless laws of life in motion.” Dr. Croly, in his “Salathiel,” pleading for the right of beauty to have a natural power over the heart, urges, for instance, that all that overcomes selfishness—the besetting sin of the world—is an instrument of good; and goes on to say that beauty is but melody of a higher kind—both alike softening the troubled and hard nature of man. “Even if we looked on a lovely woman but as on a rose, an exquisite production of the summer hours of life, it would be idle to deny her influence in making even those summer hours sweeter.” We may apply the suggestion in one of Mrs. Browning’s last poems—
“What if God has set her here
Less for action than for Being?—
For the eye and for the ear.
“Just to show what beauty may,
Just to prove what music can.”
