ose. What I wish to
add is that, being a poet, seeing and feeling like a poet, means
quite miraculously multiplying life's resources for oneself and
others; in fact the highest practicality conceivable, the real
transmutation of brass into gold. Now what we all waste, more even
than money, land, time and labour, more than we waste the efforts and
rewards of other folk, and the chances of enjoyment of unborn
generations (and half of our so-called practicality is nothing but
such waste), what we waste in short more than anything else, is our
own and our children's inborn capacity to see and feel as poets do,
and make much joy out of little material.

XVIII.

There is no machine refuse, cinder, husk, paring or rejected material
of any kind which modern ingenuity cannot turn to profit, making
useful and pleasant goods out of such rubbish as we would willingly,
at first sight, shoot out of the universe into chaos. Every material
thing can be turned, it would seem, into new textures, clean metal,
manure, fuel or what not. But while we are thus economical with our
dust-heaps, what horrid wastefulness goes on with our sensations,
impressions, memories, emotions, with our souls and all the things
that minister to their delight!

XIX.

An ignorant foreign body--and, after all, everyone is a foreigner
somewhere and ignorant about something--once committed the enormity of
asking his host, just back from cub-hunting, whether the hedgerows,
when he went out of a morning, were not quite lovely with those dewy
cobwebs which the French call Veils of the Virgin. It had to be
explained that such a sight was the most unwelcome you could imagine,
since it was a sure sign there would be no scent. The poor foreigner
was duly crestfallen, as happens whenever one has nearly spoilt a
friend's property through some piece of blundering.

But the blunder struck me as oddly symbolical. Are we not most of us
pursuing for our pleasure, though sometimes at risk of our necks, a
fox of some kind: worth nothing as meat, little as fur, good only to
gallop after, and whose unclean scent is incompatible with those
sparkling gossamers flung, for everyone's delight, over gorse and
hedgerow?

* * * * *

THE END.

TRANSCRIBER'S NOTE:

The edition from which this text was drawn is volume 4175 of the
Tauchnitz Edition of British Authors, where it appeared together with
_The Spirit of Rome_, also by Vernon Lee.