norant of what alone concerns mankind,--their
serene and gladsome influence on the mind. The greater part of poetry
is about the stars; and very justly, for they are themselves the most
classical of poets.

*****

He surprised himself by a sudden impulse to write poetry--he did so
sometimes, loose, galloping octosyllabics in the vein of Scott--and when
he had taken his place on a boulder, near some fairy falls, and shaded
by a whip of a tree that was already radiant with new leaves, it still
more surprised him that he should find nothing to write. His heart
perhaps beat in time to some vast indwelling rhythm of the universe.

*****

No man can find out the world, says Solomon, from beginning to end,
because the world is in his heart; and so it is impossible for any of
us to understand, from beginning to end, that agreement of harmonious
circumstances that creates in us the highest pleasure of admiration,
precisely because some of these circumstances are hidden from us for
ever in the constitution of our own bodies. After we have reckoned up
all that we can see or hear or feel, there still remains to be taken
into account some sensibility more delicate than usual in the nerves
affected, or some exquisite refinement in the architecture of the brain,
which is indeed to the sense of the beautiful as the eye or the ear
to the sense of hearing or sight. We admire splendid views and great
pictures; and yet what is truly admirable is rather the mind within
us, that gathers together these scattered details for its delight, and
snakes out of certain colours, certain distributions of graduated light
and darkness, that intelligible whole which alone we call a picture or
a view. Hazlitt, relating in one of his essays how he went on foot from
one great man's house to another's in search of works of art, begins
suddenly to triumph over these noble and wealthy owners, because he
was more capable of enjoying their costly possessions than they were;
because they had paid the money and he had received the pleasure. And
the occasion is a fair one for self-complacency. While the one man was
working to be able to buy the picture, the other was working to be able
to enjoy the picture. An inherited aptitude will have been diligently
improved in either case; only the one man has made for himself a
fortune, and the other has made for himself a living spirit. It is a
fair occasion for self-complacency, I repeat, when the event shows a man
to