ing of them as existing merely to make
our life bearable, we called them, like the saint of Assisi, My Lord the
Sun, and Sister Water, and Brother Fire, and thought of them with joy
and gratitude?

Certain it is that everything in the world repays courtship; and that,
quite outside all marrying and giving in marriage, in all our dealings
with all possible things, the cessation of courtship marks the incipient
necessity for divorce.

KNOWING ONE'S MIND

The only things which afforded me any pleasure in that great collection
of Ingres drawings, let alone in that very dull, frowsy, stale, and
unprofitable city of Montauban, whither I had travelled on purpose to
see it, were an old printed copy of "Don Juan oder der Steinerne
Gast"--in a glass case alongside of M. Ingres' century-long-uncleaned
fiddle--and a half-page of Mozart's autograph, given to M. Ingres when a
student by a Prix de Rome musician. I mentioned this fact to my friends,
in a spirit of guileless truthfulness; when, what was my surprise at the
story being received with smiling incredulity. "Your paradox," they
said, with the benevolent courtesy of their nation, for they were
French, "is delightful and most _reussi_. But, of course, we know you to
be exquisitely sensitive to genius in all its manifestations."

Now, I happened to know myself to be as insensible as a stone to genius
as manifested in the late M. Ingres. However, I despaired of persuading
them that I was speaking the truth; and, despite the knowledge of their
language with which they graciously credited me, I hunted about in vain
for the French equivalent of "I know my own mind." Whereupon, allowing
the conversation to take another turn, I fell to musing on those
untranslatable words, together with the whole episode of the Mozart
manuscript and the drawings of M. Ingres, including that rainy, chilly
day at Montauban; and also another day of travel, even wetter and
colder, which returned to my memory.

_Knowing one's own mind_ (in whatever way you might succeed in turning
that into French) is a first step to filling one's own place instead of
littering unprofitably over creation at large, and in so far also to
doing one's own work. Life, I am willing to admit, is not all private
garden, nor should we attempt to make it. 'Tis nine-tenths common acres,
which we must till in company, and with mutual sacrifice of our whims.
Nay, Life is largely public thoroughfares with a definite _rule o