It is not, I imagine, that porcelain actually affects the taste or quality
of the liquor. It is that some subtle sense of fitness is outraged by the
association. The harmony of things is jangled. Touch and taste are no
longer in sympathy, and we are conscious of a jar to some remote and
inexplicable fibre of our being. It is in the realm of the palate that we
get the miracle of these affinities and antipathies in their most
elementary shape. Who was it who discovered that two such curiously diverse
things as mutton and red-currant jelly make a perfect gastronomic chord? By
what stroke of inspiration or luck did some unknown cook first see that
apple sauce was just the thing to make roast pork sublime? Who was the
Prometheus who brought to earth the tidings that a clove was the lover for
whom the apple pudding had pined through all the ages?

Seen in the large, this world is just an inexhaustible mine of materials
out of which that singular adventurer, man, is eternally bringing to light
new revelations of harmony. The musician gathers together the vibrations of
the air and discovers the laws of musical agreement, and out of that
discovery emerges the stupendous mystery of song. The poet takes words, and
out of their rhythms finds the harmonious vehicle for ideas. The scientist
sees the apple fall and has the revelation of a universe moving in a
symphony before which the mind stands mute and awestruck. The cook takes
the pig from the stye and the apple from the tree and makes a pretty lyric
for the dinner-table. The Great Adventure, in short, is just this
passionate pursuit of the soul of harmony in things, great and small,
spiritual and material. We are all in the quest and our captains are those
who lead us to the highest peaks of revelation--Bach fashioning that
immortal Concerto for Two Violins that takes us out like unsullied children
into fields of asphodel; Wordsworth looking out over Tintern Abbey and
capturing for us that