sible,
tangible, may be regarded as the actual world. The real world is the
world of spiritual forces and relations, apprehended by the
imagination and received with feeling. Life, in the sense of our
conscious experience of the world, is the moving of the spirit in
emotion.

The measure of life for the individual, therefore, is the degree of
intensity with which he feels. Experience is not meted out by weeks
and months; it is to be sounded by the depth and poignancy of
instant emotion. Variety and multitude of incident may crowd
through insentient years and leave no record of their progress along
the waste places of their march. Or a day may be a lifetime. In such
moments of intensest experience time and space fall away and are
not. The outermost bounds of things recede; they vanish altogether:
and we are made free of the universe. At such moments we are truly
living; then we really _are._

As the meaning of art is not the material thing which it calls into
form, but what the work expresses of life, so in order to appreciate
art it is necessary to appreciate life, which is the inspiration of art
and its fulfillment. To appreciate life is to send out our being into
experience and to _feel_,--to realize in terms of emotion our
identity with the great universe outside of us, this world of color and
form and sound and movement, this web of illimitable activities and
energies, shot through with currents of endlessly varied and
modulated feeling. "My son," says the father in Hindu lore, pointing
to an animal, a tree, a rock, "my son, thou art that!" The universe is
one. Of it we are each an essential part, distinct as individuals, yet
fusing with it in our sense of our vital kinship with all other parts
and with the whole. I am sauntering through the Public Garden on a
fragrant hushed evening in June; touched by the lingering afterglow,
the twilight has not yet deepened into night. Grouped about a bench,
children are moving softly in the last flicker of play, while the
mother nods above them. On the next bench a wanderer is stretched
at full length, his face hidden in his crooked-up arm. I note a couple
seated, silent, with shoulder touching shoulder. I meet a young man
and woman walking hand in hand; they do not see me as I pass.
Beyond, other figures are soundless shadows, gathering out of the
enveloping dusk. It is all so intimate and friendly. The air, the
flowers, the bit of water through the trees reflecting the lig