eive the rustle of the branches, the twitter of the birds,
the light upon the grass, our soul staying quietly, as it were, at home,
and receiving these things as visits from nature; went forth, when art
appeals to us, on a sort of journey or grand tour, well provided with
guide-book knowledge, schooled beforehand which road to take, what
turnings of feeling to expect, what baggage of poetic and historic
association to lug with us, what little mole-hill eminences of thought
and feeling to stand upon, morally on tiptoe, looking down upon an
artistic scene upon which we have never before set eyes, and which is
yet as well-known, as drearily familiar to us as is the inside of our
pocket.

Such is my present mood; fickle, contradictory, unworthy, slightly
apostatising and blasphemous to my own deeper convictions, to my own
written ideas, you say; you, my friend, the poet, who insist upon people
being steadfast, unchangeable in all their feelings, because you poets
keep your own moods quite steady, as photographers keep their victims,
until you have taken the concentrated likeness, and can shift your souls
into another equally steadfast, unchangeable pose. Such is my present
mood, and you may call me what names you please for having it. All that
concerns me is that most certainly this present mood of mine happens to
be the one, of all others, in which I am least likely to be able to
muster up those two or three remarks upon art with which I ought to
conclude, and finally despatch into the limbo of things printed this
collection of studies. The things must be said. If I carry my papers
home, sit down at my table, fix my eyes upon the patterned wall-paper,
I shall, in all probability, get back within five minutes all that the
usual ideas, the usual feelings about art, in the contemplation of that
patterned blankness; all that phantasmagoria of art appreciation for
which we carry all the necessary mechanism, self-manufactured (yet very
neat) out of fragments of culture and philosophy, in a sort of little
travelling case appended to our soul. A fact this, which is suggestive;
for does not our modern, imaginative appreciation of art, do not all
those wondrous beautiful and horrible dreams and nightmares, suggested
to us by a quite plain and unsuggestive picture, statue, or piece of
music, depend a little upon our contemplation of the methodical, zig-zag
and twirligig patterned vacuity of modern life? For I suspect that, in
former