ds primarily, not on the elevation of the masses (though
this too were desirable), but on the ability of a few men to hold fast the
ancient truth and hand it down to those who come after. So shall beauty
and high thought not perish from the earth--"Doing righteousness, make
glad your heart!"

And for my own sake it is good that the work is finished. It has
overmastered my understanding too long and caused me to judge all things
by their relation to this one truth or untruth. It has debarred me from
that _sereine contemplation de l'univers_, wherein my peace and better
growth were found. I am free once again to look upon things as they are in
themselves.

LX

FROM PHILIP'S DIARY

I went yesterday afternoon to see the Warren collection of pictures which
has been sent here for sale at auction, and one little landscape impressed
me so deeply that all last night in my dreams I seemed to be walking
unaccompanied in the waste places of the artist's vision. It was a picture
by Rousseau; a _Sunset_ it was called, though something in the wide look
of expectancy and the purity of the light reminded me more of early dawn
than of evening; one waited before it for the unfolding of a great event.
A flat, marshy land stretched back to the horizon, where it blended almost
indistinguishably into the grey curtain of the sky. A deserted road wound
into the distance, passing at one spot a low boulder and farther on a
little expanse of dark water, and vanishing then into the far-off heavens.
Overhead, through the level clouds, the light pierced at intervals, wan
and cold, save near the horizon where a single spot of crimson gave hint
of the rising or the setting sun. There lay over the whole a sense of
inexpressible desertion, as if it were almost a trespass for the human eye
to intrude upon the scene--as if some sacred powers of the hidden world
had withdrawn hither for the accomplishment of a solemn mystery. As I
stood before it, a great emotion broke over me, a feeling of extraordinary
expansion, like that which comes to one in a close room when a broad
window is thrown suddenly open to the fresh air and to far-vanishing
vistas. I know little or nothing of the artist's life, but I am sure that
he had looked upon this desert scene with the same emotion of enlargement
as mine, only far greater and purer. And I know that his heart in its
loneliness had comprehended the infinite solitudes of nature and through
that act of comprehe