The Beautiful arises from the perceived harmony of an object, whether sight or sound, with the inborn and constitutive rules of the judgment and imagination: and it is always intuitive.
How wonderfully beautiful is the delineation of the characters of the three patriarchs in Genesis! To be sure if ever man could, without impropriety, be called, or supposed to be, “the friend of God,” Abraham was that man.
We may recur to it year after year, and it will supply the same nourishment and the same gratification, if only we ourselves return to it with the same healthful appetite.
Not the poem which we have read , but that to which we return , with the greatest pleasure, possesses the genuine power, and claims the name of essential poetry .
