It has been said by Schiller, in his letters on aesthetic culture, that the sense of beauty never farthered the performance of a single duty.
Although this gross and inconceivable falsity will hardly be accepted by any one in so many terms, seeing that there are few so utterly lost but that they receive, and know that they receive, at certain moments, strength of some kind, or rebuke from the appealings of outward things; and that it is not possible for a Christian man to walk across so much as a rood of the natural earth, with mind unagitated and rightly poised, without receiving strength and hope from stone, flower, leaf or sound, nor without a sense of a dew falling upon him out of the sky; though I say this falsity is not wholly and in terms admitted, yet it seems to be partly and practically so in much of the doing and teaching even of holy men, who in the recommending of the love of God to us, refer but seldom to those things in which it is most abundantly and immediately shown; though they insist much on his giving of bread, and raiment, and health (which he gives to all inferior creatures), they require us not to thank him for that glory of his works which he has permitted us alone to perceive: they tell us often to meditate in the closet, but they send us not, like Isaac, into the fields at even; they dwell on the duty of self-denial, but they exhibit not the duty of delight.[29]
John Ruskin (Modern Painters, III, I, XV).
Not on the vulgar mass
Called “work” must sentence pass,
Things done, that took the eye and had the price;
O’er which, from level stand,