raditions of modern imagination,
growing always more musical, more lyrical, more melancholy, casting up
now a Shelley, now a Swinburne, now a Wagner, are it may be the frenzy
of those that are about to see what the magic hymn printed by the Abbe
de Villars has called the Crown of Living and Melodious Diamonds. If the
carts have hit our fancy we must have the soul tight within our bodies,
for it has grown so fond of a beauty accumulated by subtle generations
that it will for a long time be impatient with our thirst for mere
force, mere personality, for the tumult of the blood. If it begin to
slip away we must go after it, for Shelley's Chapel of the Morning Star
is better than Burns's beer house--surely it was beer not
barleycorn--except at the day's weary end; and it is always better than
that uncomfortable place where there is no beer, the machine shop of the
realists.

THE MUSICIAN AND THE ORATOR

Walter Pater says music is the type of all the Arts, but somebody else,
I forget now who, that oratory is their type. You will side with the one
or the other according to the nature of your energy, and I in my present
mood am all for the man who, with an average audience before him, uses
all means of persuasion--stories, laughter, tears, and but so much music
as he can discover on the wings of words. I would even avoid the
conversation of the lovers of music, who would draw us into the
impersonal land of sound and colour, and would have no one write with a
sonata in his memory. We may even speak a little evil of musicians,
having admitted that they will see before we do that melodious crown. We
may remind them that the housemaid does not respect the piano-tuner as
she does the plumber, and of the enmity that they have aroused among all
poets. Music is the most impersonal of things and words the most
personal, and that is why musicians do not like words. They masticate
them for a long time, being afraid they would not be able to digest
them, and when the words are so broken and softened and mixed with
spittle, that they are not words any longer, they swallow them.

A BANJO PLAYER

A girl has been playing on the banjo. She is pretty and if I didn't
listen to her I could have watched her, and if I didn't watch her I
could have listened. Her voice, the movements of her body, the
expression of her face all said the same thing. A player of a different
temper and body would have made all different and might have