o
more than a silvery line dividing the blues of meeting sea and sky.
Then I went down to my cabin and locked the door and lay down on my
berth in the quiet, trying to live over again that one hour of close
contact with the beauty of the North.

After dinner that night I wrote a long letter to my cousin Viola about
the beauty of the Muir. She would understand, I knew. What I thought
she would feel, for our brains were cast in the same mould. The letter
finished, it was still too early to go to bed; so I picked up a
curious book called "Life's Shop Window" which I had been reading the
previous night, and read this passage which had struck me before, over
again:

"So, as we look into our future, we see ourselves beloved and wealthy;
victorious, famous, and free to wander through the sweetest paths of
the world, passing through a thousand scenes, sometimes loving,
sometimes warring, tasting and drinking of everything sweet and
stimulating, knowing all things, enjoying all in turn; but this is the
life of a God, not a man. And it is perhaps the God in us which so
savagely demands the life of a God."

"But it is not granted to us."

Yet this was the life I was trying to lead, and to some extent I
succeeded. Change, change, it is the life of life, perhaps especially
to the artist.

And I was an artist now, thanks to the decision of the Royal Academy
last year to accept the worst picture I had submitted to them for four
years. Ever since my fingers could clasp round anything at all they
had loved to hold a brush; for years in my teens I had studied
painting under the best teachers of technique in Italy. For two or
three years I had done really good work, with the divine afflatus
thrilling through every vein. And last year I had painted rather a
commonplace picture and it had been hung on the line in the Academy,
and so my friends all said I really was an artist now, and I modestly
accepted the style and title, with outward diffidence.

How little any of them guessed, as they congratulated me, of the wild
rapture of feeling, of intense gratitude with which I had listened to
the Divine whisper that had come to my ears as a boy of seventeen
sitting in a small bare bedroom, on the floor with the sheet of paper
before me on which I had drawn a woman's head. As I looked at it, I
knew suddenly my power, and the Voice that is above all others said
within me: "_I_ have made you an artist. None can undo or dispute MY
work."