hing his own except a lyre--_nihil reputat esse suum nisi
citharam_." Yes; nothing except a lyre.

II.

But that lyre, our only real possession, is our _Soul_. It must be
shaped, and strung, and kept carefully in tune; no easy matter in
surroundings little suited to delicate instruments and delicate music.
Possessing it, we possess, in the only true sense of possession, the
whole world. For going along our way, whether rough or even, there are
formed within us, singing the beauty and wonder of _what is_ or _what
should_ be, mysterious sequences and harmonies of notes, new every
time, answering to the primaeval everlasting affinities between
ourselves and all things; our souls becoming musical under the touch
of the universe.

Let us bear this in mind, this symbol of the lyre which Abbot Joachim
allowed as sole property to the man of spiritual life. And let us
remember that, as I tried to show in my previous chapter, the true
Lover of the Beautiful, active, self-restrained, and indifferent to
lower pleasures and interests, is in one sense your man of real
spiritual life. For the symbol of Abbot Joachim's lyre will make it
easier to follow my meaning, and easier to forestall it, while I try
to convince you that art, and all aesthetic activity, is important as a
type of the only kind of pleasure which reasonable beings should admit
of, the kind of pleasure which tends not to diminish by wastefulness
and exclusive appropriation, but to increase by sympathy, the possible
pleasures of other persons.

III.

'Tis no excessive puritanism to say that while pleasure, in the
abstract, is a great, perhaps the greatest, good; pleasures, our
actual pleasures in the concrete, are very often evil.

Many of the pleasures which we allow ourselves, and which all the
world admits our right to, happen to be such as waste wealth and time,
make light of the advantage of others, and of the good of our own
souls. This fact does not imply either original sinfulness or
degeneracy--religious and scientific terms for the same thing--in poor
mankind. It means merely that we are all of us as yet very undeveloped
creatures; the majority, moreover, less developed than the minority,
and the bulk of each individual's nature very much in the rear of his
own aspirations and definitions. Mankind, in the process of adapting
itself to external circumstances, has perforce evolved a certain
amount of intellectual and moral quality; but that intellect