y we have traveled
together, it will be natural to look back upon the road over which we
have come. Not all of it will be visible, to be sure. We have
forgotten this pleasant scene and that; others, however, remain fresh
in our minds. And as the days pass and we think over our way there
will now and again come to us a scene, a remembrance, so full of
beauty and of pleasure that we shall feel rich in the possession of
it.

To me there is nothing we have learned together greater in value,
richer in truth and comfort than the thought that the beautiful in
music and in art is at the same time the good. Even if a person is not
at all times good, there is raised in him the feeling of it whenever
he consciously looks upon a beautiful object. We see in this how wise
it is for one to choose to have beautiful things, to surround others
with them, to love them, and to place reverent hands upon them.

We can never make a mistake about gentle hands. Once a lady said to a
boy:

"You should touch all things with the same delicacy that one should
bestow upon a tender flower. It shows that deep within yourself you
are at rest, that you make your hands go forward to a task carefully
and with much thought. In the roughest games you play do not forget
this; then your hands shall be filled with all the thought you have
within yourself."

Sometimes, when I am in a great gallery, the thought is very strong in
me, that many (ever, and ever so many) people, in all countries and in
all times, have so loved the beautiful as to devote their lives to it.
Painters, who have made pictures to delight men for generations,
looked and looked and _prayed_ to find the beautiful. And we must
believe that one looks out of the heart to find the beautiful or he
finds only the common. And the sculptors who have loved marble for the
delight they have in beautiful forms, they, too, with eyes seeking
beauty, and hands so gentle upon the marble that it almost breathes
for them, they, too, have loved the beautiful.

But commoner ones have the tenderest love for what is sweet and fair
in life,--people who are neither painters nor sculptors. In their
little way--but it is a _true_ way--they have sunlight in their
hearts, and with it love for something.

Perhaps it is a flower. I have been told of a man--in fact I have seen
him--who could do the cruelest things; who was so bad that he could
not be permitted to go free among others, and yet he loved plants so
m