kets at you in contempt. Then you slink to your
seat and crouch in the darkness before the film, with every tissue
burning! The miserable wave of reaction engulfs you. To think of
compelling puppies to take your hard-earned money; fattening hogs to
hate you and yours; forcing your way among cheap and tawdry idiots--God!
What a night of pleasure!

* * * * *

Here, then, is beauty and ugliness, a wide vision of world-sacrifice, a
fierce gleam of world-hate. Which is life and what is death and how
shall we face so tantalizing a contradiction? Any explanation must
necessarily be subtle and involved. No pert and easy word of
encouragement, no merely dark despair, can lay hold of the roots of
these things. And first and before all, we cannot forget that this world
is beautiful. Grant all its ugliness and sin--the petty, horrible snarl
of its putrid threads, which few have seen more near or more often than
I--notwithstanding all this, the beauty of this world is not to be
denied.

Casting my eyes about I dare not let them rest on the beauty of Love and
Friend, for even if my tongue were cunning enough to sing this, the
revelation of reality here is too sacred and the fancy too untrue. Of
one world-beauty alone may we at once be brutally frank and that is the
glory of physical nature; this, though the last of beauties, is divine!

And so, too, there are depths of human degradation which it is not fair
for us to probe. With all their horrible prevalence, we cannot call them
natural. But may we not compare the least of the world's beauty with the
least of its ugliness--not murder, starvation, and rapine, with love and
friendship and creation--but the glory of sea and sky and city, with the
little hatefulnesses and thoughtfulnesses of race prejudice, that out
of such juxtaposition we may, perhaps, deduce some rule of beauty and
life--or death?

* * * * *

There mountains hurl themselves against the stars and at their feet lie
black and leaden seas. Above float clouds--white, gray, and inken, while
the clear, impalpable air springs and sparkles like new wine. Last night
we floated on the calm bosom of the sea in the southernmost haven of
Mount Desert. The water flamed and sparkled. The sun had gone, but above
the crooked back of cumulus clouds, dark and pink with radiance, and on
the other sky aloft to the eastward piled the gorgeous-curtained mists
of evening. Th