I wanted; the number of
course was not mental, but an obvious part of the inner impression.
However, no after explanations will help--if the art of the thing is not
apparent. I told it later in the day to another class, and a woman
said--"Why, those six words make a Japanese poem."

And yesterday again, as we walked over to dinner, she said: "I see a
Chinese city. It is dim and low and smoky. It is night and the lights
are at half-mast."

She had been making a picture of her own of China. It throws the child
in on herself to imagine thus. She has never been to China, and her
reading on the subject was not recent. I always say to them: "It is all
within. If you can listen deeply enough and see far enough, you can get
it all. When a man wishes to write about a country, he is hindered as
much as helped if he knows much about it. He feels called upon to
express that which he has seen--which is so small compared to the big
colour and atmosphere."

I had been to China but would have required a page to make such a
picture.

A little while before she had been to Holland in fancy. She had told a
story of a child there and "the little house in which she lived looked
as if it had been made of old paving-blocks ripped up from the street."

Often she falls back upon the actual physical environment _to get
started_, as this recent introduction: "To-day I am sitting on the end
of a breakwater, listening to the peaceful noise the Lake makes as it
slaps up against the heavy old rocks. The sun is pouring down hot rays
upon my arms, bare feet and legs, turning them from winter's faded
white----"

Or:

"Once I had my back up against an old Beech tree on a carpet of spring
beauties and violet plants. Spiders, crickets and all sorts of little
woodland bugs went crawling on me and around, but instead of shuddering
at their little legs, I felt a part----"

I said to her about the China picture: "Put it down, and be careful to
write it just as you see it, not trying to say what you have heard,--at
least, until after your first picture is made...." I had a conviction
that something prompted that "half-mast" matter, and that if we could
get just at that process in the child's mind, we should have something
very valuable for all concerned. But we can only approximate the inner
pictures. The quality of impressionism in artistry endeavours to do
that--to hurl the fleeting things into some kind of lasting expression.
The greatest expressi