towards a direct and concrete experience_"--and there were a
hundred more.

Then for the young craftsman what an insight into, what a compassionate,
childish remembrance of the moods and the little foolish accidents of
creation: "_His dilettanteism, his assiduous preoccupation with what
might seem but the details of mere form or manner, was, after all, bent
upon the function of bringing to the surface, sincerely and in their
integrity, certain strong personal intuitions, certain visions or
apprehensions of things as being, with important results, in this way
rather than that--apprehensions which the artistic or literary
expression was called upon to follow, with the exactness of wax or clay,
clothing the model within it. Flavian, too, with his fine, clear mastery
of the practically effective, had early laid hold of the principle, as
axiomatic in literature: That 'to know when one's self is interested, is
the first condition of interesting other people'"_ And once more: "_As
it oftenest happens also, with natures of genuinely poetic quality,
those piecemeal beginnings came suddenly to harmonious completeness
among the fortunate incidents, the physical heat and light, of one
singularly happy day_."

And, over all, what a beauty! a beauty at once so sensuous and so
spiritual--the beauty of flowering laurel, the beauty of austerity
aflower. Here the very senses prayed. Surely this was the most
beautiful prose book ever written! It had been compared, he saw, with
Gautier's "Mademoiselle de Maupin;" but was not the beauty of that
masterpiece, in comparison with the beauty of this, as the beauty of a
leopard-skin to the beauty of a statue of Minerva, withdrawn in a
grove of ilex.