beauty and the proverbial eye of the beholder

A brief blurb on beauty from Peter Leithart in Touchstone...

"Beauty is in the eye of the beholder", we say, hoping to stop all argument about beauty. We instinctively think that beauty is in the realm of subjectivity par excellence...

[But] we don't grip, but are gripped by, the intense colors of a sunset, the grace of a galloping horse, the soaring soprano in Allegri's Miserere or Mozart's The Magic Flute, the celestial stillness of a cathedral.

Beauty surprises. It is not in the eye, but seizes it.