of the mosaic into an uneven surface: the
gold seeming to have become alive and in a way vegetable, and to have
faded and shrunk like autumn leaves.

XI.

The morning I speak of they were singing some fugued composition by I
know not whom. How well that music suited St. Mark's! The constant
interchange of vault and vault, cupola and cupola, column and column,
handing on their energies to one another; the springing up of new
details gathered at once into the great general balance of lines and
forces; all this seemed to find its natural voice in that fugue, to
express, in that continuous revolution of theme chasing, enveloping
theme, its own grave emotion of life everlasting: Being, becoming;
becoming, being.

XII.

It is such an alternation as this, ceaseless, rhythmic, which
constitutes the upward life of the soul: that life of which the wise
woman of Mantineia told Socrates that it might be learned through
faithful and strenuous search for ever widening kinds of beauty, the
"life above all," in the words of Diotima, "which a man should live."

The life which vibrates for ever between being better and conceiving
of something better still; between satisfaction in harmony and craving
for it. The life whose rhythm is that of happiness actual and
happiness ideal, alternating for ever, for ever pressing one another
into being, as the parts of a fugue, the dominant and the tonic.
Being, becoming; becoming, being; idealising, realising; realising,
idealising.

BEAUTY AND SANITY.

I.

Out of London at last; at last, though after only two months! Not,
indeed, within a walk of my clump of bay-trees on the Fiesole hill;
but in a country which has some of that Tuscan grace and serene
austerity, with its Tweed, clear and rapid in the wide shingly bed,
with its volcanic cones of the Eildons, pale and distinct in the
distance: river and hills which remind me of the valley where the
bay-trees grow, and bring to my mind all that which the bay-trees
stand for.

There is always something peculiar in these first hours of finding
myself once more alone, once more quite close to external things; the
human jostling over, an end, a truce at least, to "all the neighbours'
talk with man and maid--such men--all the fuss and trouble of street
sounds, window-sights" (how he knew these things, the poet!); once
more in communion with the things which somehow--nibbled grass and
stone-tossed water, yellow ragwort in the fields