A thing of beauty is a joy forever.—Keats
The love of beauty is an essential part of all healthy human nature.
—Ruskin
The sense of beauty is its own excuse for being.—Dr. Hedge
If eyes were made for seeing,
Then beauty is its own excuse for being.—Emerson
One of the principal objects of the large amount of "nature study" that, within recent years, has been pursued in our public schools, is to develop in the pupils the love of the beautiful. The beautiful in nature and art is that which gives pleasure to the senses. The question might be asked, "Why do some forms and colors please, and others displease?" Yankee fashion, it might be answered by the question, "Why do we like sugar and dislike wormwood?" It is also a fact that cultivated minds derive more pleasure from nature and art than uncultivated minds.
This fact is aptly illustrated by the following remark of a little girl in one of the lower grades of our public schools. Shortly after she had taken up the study of plants and minerals she came to her teacher and said, "Oh! we have a lovely time now when we go up to the reservoir to play. Before we studied about plants and stones, we used to go up there and sit down and look around; but now we find so many beautiful things to look at. We know the plants and stones; and what pleasure it does give us to find a new specimen!" This child's love of the beautiful was being intelligently developed.
Natural beauty is an all-pervading presence. It unfolds into the numberless flowers of spring. It waves in the branches of the trees and the green blades of grass. It haunts the depths of the earth and the sea, and gleams from the hues of the shell and the precious stone. And not only these minute objects, but the ocean, the mountains, the clouds, the heavens, the stars, the rising and setting sun—all overflow with beauty. The universe is its temple; and those men who are alive to it cannot lift their eyes without feeling themselves encompassed with it on every side. This beauty is so precious, the enjoyments it gives are so refined and pure, so congenial to our tenderest and noblest feelings, and so akin to worship, that it is painful to think of the multitude of persons living in the midst of it and yet remaining almost as blind to it as if they were tenants of a dungeon.
All persons should seek to become sufficiently acquainted with the beautiful in nature to secure to themselves the rich fund of happiness which it is so well able to give. There is not a worm we tread upon, nor a rare leaf that dances merrily as it falls before the autumn winds, but has superior claims upon our study and admiration. The child who plucks a rose to pieces, or crushes the fragile form of a fluttering insect, destroys a work which the highest art could not create, nor man's best skilled hand construct.
One of the first forms in which man's idea of the beautiful shaped itself was in architecture. Extremely crude at first, this love for beautiful buildings has been highly developed among civilized nations. Ruskin says, "All good architecture is the expression of national life and character, and is produced by a permanent and eager desire or taste for beauty."
A taste for pictures, merely, is not in itself a moral quality; but the taste for good pictures is. A beautiful painting by one of the great artists, a Grecian statue, or a rare coin, or magnificent building, is a good and perfect thing; for it gives constant delight to the beholder.