auty? Can we put them into an individual life;
can anything be put into an individual life save furniture and
garments, intellectual as well as material? For an individual life,
taken separately, is a narrow, weak thing at the very best; and
everything we can put into it, everything we lay hold of for the sake
of putting in, must needs be small also, merely the chips or dust of
great things; or if it have life, must be squeezed, cut down, made so
small before it can fit into that little receptacle of our egoism,
that it will speedily be a dead, dry thing: thoughts once thought,
feelings once felt, now neither thought nor felt, merely lying there
inert, as a dead fact, in our sterile self. Do we not see this on all
sides, examples of life into which all the dignified things have been
crammed and all the beautiful ones, and which despite the statues,
pictures, poems, and symphonies within its narrow compass, is yet so
far from dignified or beautiful?

But we need not trouble about dignity and beauty coming to our life so
long as we veritably and thoroughly _live_; that is to say, so long as
we try not to put anything into our life, but to put our life into the
life universal. The true, expanding, multiplying life of the spirit
will bring us in contact, we need not fear, with beauty and dignity
enough, for there is plenty such in creation, in things around us, and
in other people's souls; nay, if we but live to our utmost power the
life of all things and all men, seeing, feeling, understanding for the
mere joy thereof, even our individual life will be invested with
dignity and beauty in our own eyes.

But furniture will not do it, nor dress, nor exquisite household
appointments; nor any of the things, books, pictures, houses, parks,
of which we can call ourselves owners. I say _call_ ourselves: for can
we be sure we really possess them? And thus, if we think only of our
life, and the decking thereof, it is only furniture, garments, and
household appointments we can deal with; for beauty and dignity cannot
be confined in so narrow a compass.

VII.

I have spoken so far of the conscious habit of harmony, and of its
conscious effect upon our conduct. I have tried to show that the
desire for congruity, which may seem so trivial a part of mere
dilettanteist superfineness, may expand and develop into such love of
harmony between ourselves and the ways of the universe as shall make
us wince at other folks' loss united to o