X.
BEAUTY.
Very much of the delight with which we pursue natural history is surely due to the almost constant recognition of the beautiful. I do not know that I could say with the poet,—
"A thing of beauty is a joy for ever;"
but certainly it is a joy as long as it endures; and the naturalist finds an endless recurrence of things of beauty. Birds, insects, shells, zoophytes, flowers, sea-weeds, are all redundant of beauty; and all the classes of natural objects, though not in an equal degree, nor manifestly in every individual object, yet possess it as a prominent element. Indeed, from the profusion with which loveliness is sown broadcast over the works of God, I have often thought, though it is not directly revealed, that a sense of the beautiful and a complacency in it, altogether independent of fitness for certain ends, or the uses which may be subserved, is an attribute of the Holy One Himself, and that our perception of it is the reflection of His—a part of that image of God in which man was created, and which sin has not wholly obliterated. I know that God may have clothed His works with beauty for other admiring eyes than man's; and that it is probable that the holy angels may be far more conversant with creation than we are with all our researches,—that the ten thousand times ten thousand flowers which are "born to blush unseen" by man, may be seen and admired by "ten thousand times ten thousand" angels,[203] and thus the tribute of praise for their perfection may be ever ascending before Him whose hands made them for His glory. We may allow this; and yet with reverence presume that His own pure eyes look upon the lilies' array with a delight in their mere loveliness, infinitely greater than that which men, or even angels, take in it, seeing it is written,—"for thy pleasure they are, and were created."
I remember being struck, and somewhat awed, too, with a thought of this kind, once, when, pushing my way through a very dense and tangled thicket in a lone and lofty mountain region of Jamaica, sufficiently remote from the dwellings of man to render it probable that no civilized human foot had penetrated thither before. I suddenly came upon a most magnificent terrestrial orchid in full blossom. It was Phajus Tankervilliæ,—a noble plant, which from the midst of broad leaves growing out of a mass of green bulbs, had thrown up its stout blossom-stems to the height of a yard or more, crowned with the pyramidal spike of lily-like flowers, whose expanding petals of pure white on one side and golden brown on the other, and trumpet-lip of gorgeous purple seemed, to my ravished gaze, the very perfection of beauty. For ages, I thought, that beauteous flower had been growing in that wild and unvisited spot, every season "filling the air around with beauty," and had in all probability never met a single human gaze before. Had, then, all that divinely-formed loveliness been mere waste for those generations? I asked myself; and I immediately replied, No: the eye of God himself hath rested on it with satisfaction, and the Lord hath taken pleasure in this work of His hands.
I shall not make this chapter an essay on the sublime and beautiful, nor seek to analyse the sense of beauty. It is enough that it is an appetite of our being, and that most abundantly in nature, on every side, there is the material of its gratification. So abundantly, indeed, that it were easy to expand the few pages which I propose to devote to the subject into a volume, or a dozen volumes, and yet leave untouched vast treasures of the beautiful in natural history. I must content myself and my readers with the selection of a few of the more prominent objects in which this sense is gratified, and with a discrimination of two or three distinct phases or conditions of existence which contribute, each in its measure, to give delight to the eyes.
