BEAUTY IS NOT SUBJECTIVE:

Newman did not want to be misunderstood as one interested in an aesthetic of beauty which neither leads to nothing beyond itself nor becomes a mere sort of self-advertising for the aesthetic self.

He finds this beauty in nature first because nature is alive and points beyond itself toward its Creator. Nature, in other words, is obviously alive and is not a "sullen" wall or an "eyeless tower" or a "tongueless" hall. Nature breathes, moves, and speaks, the effect of the "master-hand" hidden both behind and within. It's the poet's master-hand, then, which lets "rich nature ... Unfold her varied plan."

Much like his sermon voice, however, Newman suppressed the kind of poetry of, say, Wordsworthian dramatic self-advertisement, during which a spot of time leads him to utter that he again is strong; rather Newman is intending something beyond his personality and thus attempting to reach his auditors' hearts. Near the end of his sermon "Wisdom and Innocence," for example, he draws poetically upon the image of a garden at the close of day "when the shades lengthen, and the evening comes, and the busy world is hushed, and the fever for life is over and our work is done."

The point is not abstract but clear that Newman held a lively hope in the brighter and more beautiful world of the eternal heaven which, as Father Nicholls writes, is "not merely a future reality, but ... a present one awaiting its unveiling." For Newman beauty is to be treated with caution and reverence rather than a mere "superficial sense of aesthetic pleasure."

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