music of a Strauss waltz makes us gay, and Handel's Largo
serious, it is not because we are reminded of the ballroom or
of the cathedral, but because the physical response to the
stimulus of the music is itself the basis of the emotion.
What makes the sense of peace in the atmosphere of the Low
Countries? Only the tendency, on following those level lines
of landscape, to assume ourselves the horizontal, and the
restfulness which belongs to that posture. If the crimson of
a picture by Bocklin, or the golden glow of a Giorgione, or
the fantastic gleam of a Rembrandt speaks to me like a human
voice, it is not because it expresses to me an idea, but
because it impresses that sensibility which is deeper than
ideas,--the region of the emotional response to color and to
light. What is the beauty of the "Ulalume," or "Kubla Khan,"
or "Ueber allen Gipfeln"? It is the way in which the form
in its exquisite fitness to our senses, and the emotion
belonging to that particular form as organic reverberation
therefrom, in its exquisite fitness to thought, create in us
a delight quite unaccounted for by the ideas which they
express. This is the essence of beauty,--the possession of
a quality which excites the human organism to functioning
harmonious with its own nature.

We can see in this definition the possibility of an aesthetic
which shall have objective validity because founded in the
eternal properties of human nature, while it yet allows us to
understand that in the limits within which, by education and
environment, the empirical man changes, his norms of beauty
must vary, too. Ideas can change in interest and in value,
but these energies lie much deeper than the idea, in the