hts of the
little bridge, are a caress. And it is all for me! I am a child at his
tired play, I am the sleeping tramp, I am the young fellow with his
girl. It is not the sentiment of the thing, received intellectually, that
makes it mine. My being goes out into these other lives and becomes
one with them. I feel them in myself. It is not thought that
constitutes appreciation; it is emotion.

Another glimpse, caught this time through a car window. Now it is a
winter twilight. The flurry of snow has passed. The earth is
penetrated with blue light, suffused by it, merged in it, ever blue.
Vague forms, still and shadowy, of hills and trees, soppy with light,
are blue within the blue. The brief expanse of bay is deeply
luminous and within the pervasive tempering light resolves itself
into the cool and solemn reaches of the sky which bends down and
touches it. Once more my spirit meets and mingles with the spirit of
the landscape. By the harmony of nature's forms and twilight tones I
am brought into a larger harmony within myself and with the world
around.

All experience offers to us at any moment just such possibilities of
living. The infinite and ever-changing expressiveness of nature at
every instant of day and night is ours to read if we will but look
upon it with the inner vision. The works of men in cities and
cultivated fields, if we will see beyond the actual material, may
quicken our emotions until we enact in ourselves their story of
struggle, of hopes and ambitions partly realized, of defeat or final
triumph. The faces seen in a passing crowd bear each the record of
life lived, of lives like ours of joys or disappointments, lives of great
aims or no aims at all, of unwritten heroisms, of hidden tragedies
bravely borne, lives sordid and mean or generous and bright. The
panorama of the world unrolls itself _for us._ It is ours to experience
and live out in our own being according as we are able to feel. Just
as the impulse to expression is common to all men, and all are artists
potentially, differing in the depth of their insight into life and in the
degree of emotion they have to express, so appreciation lies within
the scope of all, and the measure of it to us as individuals is
determined by our individual capability of response.

Life means to each one of us what we are able to receive of it in
"wise passiveness," and then are able by the constructive force of
our individuality to shape into coherence and com