uns hard and
heavily. The 'cudgelling of the brain' is as good labour as the
grinding of the colours, ... do you not think?

If ever I am in the Sistine Chapel, it will not be with Mrs.
Jameson--no. If ever I should be there, what teaching I shall want,
_I_ who have seen so few pictures, and love them only as children do,
with an unlearned love, just for the sake of the thoughts they bring.
Wonderfully ignorant I am, to have had eyes and ears so long! There is
music, now, which lifts the hair on my head, I feel it so much, ...
yet all I know of it as art, all I have heard of the works of the
masters in it, has been the mere sign and suggestion, such as the
private piano may give. I never heard an oratorio, for instance, in my
life--judge by _that_! It is a guess, I make, at all the greatness and
divinity ... feeling in it, though, distinctly and certainly, that a
composer like Beethoven _must_ stand above the divinest painter in
soul-godhead, and nearest to the true poet, of all artists. And this
I felt in my guess, long before I knew you. But observe how, if I had
died in this illness, I should have left a sealed world behind me!
_you_, unknown too--unguessed at, _you_, ... in many respects,
wonderfully unguessed at! Lately I have learnt to despise my own
instincts. And apart from those--and _you_, ... it was right for me to
be melancholy, in the consciousness of passing blindfolded under all
the world-stars, and of going out into another side of the creation,
with a blank for the experience of this ... the last revelation,
unread! How the thought of it used to depress me sometimes!

Talking of music, I had a proposition the other day from certain of
Mr. Russell's (the singer's) friends, about his setting to music my
'Cry of the Children.' His programme exhibits all the horrors of the
world, I see! Lifeboats ... madhouses ... gamblers' wives ... all done
to the right sort of moaning. His audiences must go home delightfully
miserable, I should fancy. He has set the 'Song of the Shirt' ... and
my 'Cry of the Children' will be acceptable, it is supposed, as a
climax of agony. Do you know this Mr. Russell, and what sort of music
he suits to his melancholy? But to turn my 'Cry' to a 'Song,' a
burden, it is said, is required--he can't sing it without a burden!
and behold what has been sent 'for my approval'.... I shall copy it
_verbatim_ for you....

And the threads twirl, twirl, twirl,
Before each boy and gi