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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www. million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: AUTHOR'S PREFACE. A Taste for the imitative arts is not like that spontaneous poetical susceptibility, which nature herself has implanted in every mind. The traces and indications of poetical feeling may sometimes appear to be almost effaced; yet it is only because the fine spirit is dulled, and its perceptions blunted by the heavy external pressure of daily cares and the chilling, mechanical routine of actual life. Fancy, with her gushing feelings, her sympathies of memory and anticipation, is an intrinsic element of the human soul, ever ready to vibrate at the faintest touch, and start into responsive life: but, to discern the beauty of material forms, fancy and imagination alone will not suffice, they must have a peculiar bias and direction, and be blended and inter-penetrated with a high development of those sensual organs to which each of these arts peculiarly addresses itself. Nor does this taste depend upon the organisation alone; a person may be endowed with visual organs of the most perfect structure, nay, of more than ordinary acuteness, and yet no perception of beauty be associated therewith. The faculty by which the eye becomes endowed with a clear, inborn perception of the beautiful in painting and in material form, or the ear awakened to the spirit of sound and its delicate harmonious magic, lies rather in the mysterious depths of organisation and the special qualities of the soul in its unseen spiritual life-in a combination and union of the senses and imagination, scarcely explicable even by the gifted individual himself. We cannot, therefore, be surprised if learned inquirers, deep thinkers, and even poets of genius, are often deficient in the perception of beauty in the imitative arts, and perhaps, after a life-long occupation amid its themes and
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