sound; but it is not that we all agree about the beauty of
different things. Some see a great deal more than others, and some
eyes and ears are delighted and pleased by what to more trained and
fastidious senses seems coarse and shocking and vulgar. But that makes
little difference; the point is that we have within us an apprehension
of a quality which gives us a peculiar kind of delight; and even if it
does not give us that delight when we are dull or anxious or
miserable, we still know that the quality is there. I remember how
when I had a long and dreary illness, with much mental depression, one
of my greatest tortures was to be for ever seeing the beauty in
things, but not to be able to enjoy it. The part of the brain that
enjoyed was sick and uneasy; but I was never in any doubt that beauty
was there, and had power to please the soul, if only the physical
machinery were not out of gear, so that the pain of transmission
overcame the sense of delight.

Poetry is then in its essence the discerning of beauty; and that
beauty is not only the beauty of things heard and seen, but may dwell
very deep in the mind and soul, and be stirred by visions which seem
to have no connection with outside things at all.

IV

POETRY AND LIFE

Now I will try to say how poetry enters into life for most of us; and
this is not an easy thing to express, because one can only look into
the treasure of one's own experience, wander through the corridors and
halls of memory, and see the faded tapestries, the pictures, and,
above all, the portraits which hang upon the walls. I suppose that
there are many people into whose spirits poetry only enters in the
form of love, when they suddenly see a face that they have beheld
perhaps often before, and have vaguely liked, and realise that it has
suddenly put on some new and delicate charm, some curve of cheek or
floating tress; or there is something in the glance that was surely
never there before, some consciousness of a secret that may be shared,
some signal of half-alarmed interest, something that shows that the
two lives, the two hearts, have some joyful significance for each
other; and then there grows up that marvellous mood which men call
love, which loses itself in hopes of meeting, in fears of coldness, in
desperate desires to please, to impress; and there arise too all sorts
of tremulous affectations, which seem so petty, so absurd, and even so
irritating, to the spectators of the