sense of preference, than to continue attempting to correct it by
the standard of other people.

It remains that the whole instinct for admiring beauty is one of
the most mysterious experiences of the mind. There are certain
things, like the curves and colours of flowers, the movements of
young animals, that seem to have a perennial attraction for the
human spirit. But the enjoyment of natural scenery, at all events
of wild and rugged prospects, seems hardly to have existed among
ancient writers, and to have originated as late as the eighteenth
century. Dr. Johnson spoke of mountains with disgust, and Gray
seems to have been probably the first man who deliberately
cultivated a delight in the sight of those "monstrous creatures of
God," as he calls mountains. Till his time, the emotions that
"nodding rocks" and "cascades" gave our forefathers seem mostly to
have been emotions of terror; but Gray seems to have had a
perception of the true quality of landscape beauty, as indeed that
wonderful, chilly, unsatisfied, critical nature seems to have had
of almost everything. His letters are full of beautiful vignettes,
and it pleases me to think that he visited Rydal and thought it
beautiful, about the time that Wordsworth first drew breath.

But the perception of beauty in art, in architecture, in music, is
a far more complicated thing, for there seem to be no fixed canons
here; what one needs in art, for instance, is not that things
should be perfectly seen and accurately presented; a picture of
hard fidelity is often entirely displeasing; but one craves for a
certain sense of personality, of emotion, of inner truth; something
that seizes tyrannously upon the soul, and makes one desire more of
the intangible and indescribable essence.