it depends upon ourselves.]

If to feel keenly be a nobler state than to drone with blunt edges
through that thicket of myrtle and nightshade we call life, then is the
artistic temperament a blessing. If the oyster be more enviable than the
nightingale, then is it a curse. It all depends on our angle, and the
colours we most prefer in the prism. He who has the artistic temperament
knows depths and heights such as Those Others cannot even imagine. The
feet that spring into the courts of heaven by a look or a word--by the
glory of the starry night or the radiance of the dawn--stray down into
the deepest abysses of hell, when Love has died or Nature forgets to
smile. To the artistic temperament there is but little of the mean of
things. The "Mezzo Cammin" is a line too narrow for their eager steps.
Proportion is the one quality in emotional geometry which is left out of
their lesson of life. Their grammar deals only with superlatives; and
the positive seems to them inelastic, dead and common-place. Imaginative
sympathy colours and transforms the whole picture of existence. By this
sympathy the artistic of temperament knows the secrets of souls, and
understands all where Those Others see nothing. And herein lies one
source of those waters of bitterness which so often flood his heart.
Feeling for and with his kind, as accurately as the mirror reflects the
object held before it, he finds none to share the pain, the joy, the
indignation he endures by this sympathy, which is reflection. He visits
the Grundyite, who says "Shocking," "Not nice," when human nature
writhes in its agony and cries aloud for that drop of water which he,
the virtuous conformist, refuses. He goes to the flat-footed and
broad-waisted; those who plod along the beaten highway, and turn neither
to the right hand nor to the left, neither to the hills nor the hollows.
But he speaks a foreign language, and they heed him not. The iron-bound
care nought. Does that cry of suffering raise the price of stocks or
lower that of grain? Tush! let it pass. To each back its own burden. So
he carries the piteous tale whereby his heart is aching for sympathy,
and Those Others give him stones for bread and a serpent for a fish.
Then he looks up to heaven, and asks if there be indeed a God to suffer
all this wrong; or if there be, How long, O Lord, how long! The artistic
temperament is not merely artistic perception, with which it is so often
confounded. You may be steeped t