nery. It was sunset and the stormy clouds hung upon mountain after
mountain, and far off on one great summit a cloud darker than the rest
glimmered with lightning. Away south upon another mountain a mediaeval
tower, with no building near nor any sign of life, rose into the clouds.
I saw suddenly in the mind's eye an old man, erect and a little gaunt,
standing in the door of the tower, while about him broke a windy light.
He was the poet who had at last, because he had done so much for the
word's sake, come to share in the dignity of the saint. He had hidden
nothing of himself, but he had taken care of 'that dignity ... the
perfection of form ... this lofty and severe quality ... this virtue.'
And though he had but sought it for the word's sake, or for a woman's
praise, it had come at last into his body and his mind. Certainly as he
stood there he knew how from behind that laborious mood, that pose, that
genius, no flower of himself but all himself, looked out as from behind
a mask that other Who alone of all men, the country-people say, is not a
hair's breadth more nor less than six feet high. He has in his ears
well-instructed voices and seeming solid sights are before his eyes, and
not as we say of many a one, speaking in metaphor, but as this were
Delphi or Eleusis, and the substance and the voice come to him among his
memories which are of women's faces; for was it Columbanus or another
that wrote 'There is one among the birds that is perfect, and one
perfect among the fish'?

THE THINKING OF THE BODY

Those learned men who are a terror to children and an ignominious sight
in lovers' eyes, all those butts of a traditional humour where there is
something of the wisdom of peasants, are mathematicians, theologians,
lawyers, men of science of various kinds. They have followed some
abstract reverie, which stirs the brain only and needs that only, and
have therefore stood before the looking-glass without pleasure and never
known those thoughts that shape the lines of the body for beauty or
animation, and wake a desire for praise or for display.

There are two pictures of Venice side by side in the house where I am
writing this, a Canaletto that has little but careful drawing, and a not
very emotional pleasure in clean bright air, and a Franz Francken, where
the blue water, that in the other stirs one so little, can make one long
to plunge into the green depth where a cloud shadow falls. Neither
painting could move us