d,
his style would become cold and monotonous, and his sense of beauty
faint and sickly, as are both style and beauty to my imagination in the
prose and poetry of Newman, but be content to find his pleasure in all
that is for ever passing away that it may come again, in the beauty of
woman, in the fragile flowers of spring, in momentary heroic passion, in
whatever is most fleeting, most impassioned, as it were, for its own
perfection, most eager to return in its glory. Yet perhaps he must
endure the impermanent a little, for these things return, but not
wholly, for no two faces are alike, and, it may be, had we more learned
eyes, no two flowers. Is it that all things are made by the struggle of
the individual and the world, of the unchanging and the returning, and
that the saint and the poet are over all, and that the poet has made his
home in the Serpent's mouth?

THE BLACK AND THE WHITE ARROWS

Instinct creates the recurring and the beautiful, all the winding of the
serpent; but reason, the most ugly man, as Blake called it, is a drawer
of the straight line, the maker of the arbitrary and the impermanent,
for no recurring spring will ever bring again yesterday's clock.
Sanctity has its straight line also, darting from the centre, and with
these arrows the many-coloured serpent, theme of all our poetry, is
maimed and hunted. He that finds the white arrow shall have wisdom older
than the Serpent, but what of the black arrow? How much knowledge, how
heavy a quiver of the crow-feathered ebony rods can the soul endure?

HIS MISTRESS'S EYEBROWS

The preoccupation of our Art and Literature with knowledge, with the
surface of life, with the arbitrary, with mechanism, has arisen out of
the root. A careful but not necessarily very subtle man could foretell
the history of any religion if he knew its first principle, and that it
would live long enough to fulfil itself. The mind can never do the same
thing twice over, and having exhausted simple beauty and meaning, it
passes to the strange and hidden, and at last must find its delight,
having outrun its harmonies in the emphatic and discordant. When I was a
boy at the art school I watched an older student late returned from
Paris, with a wonder that had no understanding in it. He was very
amorous, and every new love was the occasion of a new picture, and every
new picture was uglier than its forerunner. He was excited about his
mistress's eyebrows, as was fitting, but the