Full article is at "This I believe." For me, the beautiful resides in the physical, but it is spiritual. I have never heard a sermon as spiritual in either phrase or fact as, “Waters on a starry night are beautiful and free.” No hymn lifts my heart higher than the morning call of the bobwhite or the long fluting cry of sandhill cranes out of the sky at dusk. I have never smelled incense in a church as refining to the spirit as a spring breeze laden with aroma from a field of bluebonnets.
Not all hard truths are beautiful, but beauty is truth. It incorporates love and is incorporated by love. It is the goal of all great art. Its presence everywhere makes it free to all. It is not so abstract as justice, but beauty and intellectual freedom and justice, all incorporating truth and goodness, are constant sustainers to my mind and spirit.
Educator and folklorist J. Frank Dobie wrote numerous books and articles about vanishing ways of life on the ranches of his native Texas. He taught in the English department at the University of Texas for many years and was a lecturer on U.S. history at Cambridge during World War II.
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