the long-withheld right of purchasing land in India on feesimple, and also of redeeming the land-tax,--the urgent expediency of which measures is advocated in the essay, and the importance of which will be seen from the exposition there given of the peculiar modes of land-tenure which have existed in India from immemorial time. R. H. P. DECEMBER 26, 1861. ERRATU M. On page 201, sixth line from top, for “irrigation, but for vegetation," read "vegetation, but for irrigation." ESSAYS IN HISTORY AND ART COLOUR IN NATURE AND ART NATURE is no mere utilitarian. The so-called utility which regards only the lower half of human nature-which cares for bodily wants and pecuniary profits, but which ignores the higher emotions from the regulated play of whose fountains proceeds all that is worthy of the name of Joy-finds nothing in the economy of nature to support its materialistic exclusiveness. If the Utilitarians had had the making of our world, they would doubtless have made it very fertile and free of weeds, and Quaker-like have dressed it in shapes and hues savouring strongly of the sombre and the useful;-but alas for the beautiful! That cream of life and bloom of nature, what is it to them? Working unseen upon the spirit, and only revealing itself by the lighting of the eye and the beaming of the countenance,—exciting an emotion which, though brilliant and elevating and full of the divine, seems to produce nothing, and rather to lessen men's devotion to materialistic pursuits,-Utilitarians ignore it, and in the world of their own devising, would have flung aside flowers as cumberers of the ground, and looked upon roses as but painted weeds. They A "Could strip, for aught the prospect yields With which the sun his setting shrouds." Not so, however, has acted the Divine Maker. All that is useful is indeed around us, but how much more is there beside? We stroll out of a morning, and lo! birds are singing, and waters murmuring, and the sun is rising with a cool brightness that makes everything look young,-dancing like dazzling silver on the wavelets of the brook, and filling the skies with a joyous splendour, and the heart with an ethereal merriment. Who has not felt, in the bright hours of all seasons, but especially in the radiant days of summer, what the poet has well called "The strange superfluous glory of the air!" as if, beside all the combined gases needful for our respiration, there were present some ethereal nectarine element, baffling the analysis of the chemist, yet revealing its power in the thrill of exuberant life which it excites in the human frame,—a true elixir vitæ, a "superfluous glory" added for the sole purpose of producing joy. Enter the garden, and forthwith the eye is charmed with the sight of flowers, the nostrils thrill with the scents floating on the morning air, and peaches and all manner of fruit are there, pleasing both eye and palate far more than mere utility demands. The very hedgerows, and woody dells of nature's own planting, are full of beauty,—bright and sweet with the hawthorn, the sweetbriar, and the honeysuckle. Hill and valley meet each other by picturesque gradation; brooks and rivers leap and run in courses which please all the more because dissimilar from the rectilinearism of utility. All things proclaim that the Divine Architect, while amply providing for the wants, has not forgotten the enjoyment, of his creatures; and having implanted in the human soul a yearning after the beautiful, has surrounded us with a thousand objects by whose presence that yearning may be gratified. |