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: BOOK L NATURE OF BEAUTY. CHAPTER I. BEAUTY IN THE CONCRETE THE RAINBOW. § 2. Our first step is to find an instance of beauty ;—an instance in which we undeniably feel the effects of what we call beauty ;—an instance, to speak more scientifically, in which the beautiful comes into our experience. We are to take first some familiar occasion on which the common fact in question is experienced ; and then our next step will be to separate, by a careful analysis of the complicated elements of the phenomenon, such as are essential from those which are merely associated with it whether necessarily or accidentally. We have then, all of us, had our at- Experience of Beauty instanced tention arrested by the appearance, in the Rainbow. J near the close of some summer day, of a bow of light, exceedingly brilliant, and of various hues, and in form, undeviatingly circular, without a break in its light or an imperfection in its regular outline, arching the entire circuit of the visible heavens before us, and seemingly resting ona dark, chaotic mass of cloud, with which it appears to be connected in close relationship. The outward sense is riveted to it by a most pleasurable sensation and the inner spirit by a most loving admiration. This is the familiar phenomenon of the Rainbow; —the outer occasion and the inner experience. It will be unhesitatingly accepted as an instance in which the Beautiful enters into our experience. It has been so in all ages. " Look," says the Son of Sirach, " Look upon the Rainbow, and praise him that made it; very beautiful it is in its brightness ; it encompasses the heavens with a glorious circle ; and the hands of the Most High have bended it." It is a complex phenomenon. Let us seek carefully to ascertain its constituting eleme...