the stateliness of the cadenced metre, in the music and colour of
the linked words, than in any direct utterance; lives, one might
say, in the perfection of the form more than in the pathos of the
feeling. And yet, after the broken music of love and the burial of
love in the autumn woods, we can trace that wandering among strange
people, and in lands unknown to us, by which we try so pathetically
to heal the hurts of the life we know, and that pure and passionate
devotion to Art which one gets when the harsh reality of life has
too suddenly wounded one, and is with discontent or sorrow marring
one's youth, just as often, I think, as one gets it from any
natural joy of living; and that curious intensity of vision by
which, in moments of overmastering sadness and despair
ungovernable, artistic things will live in one's memory with a
vivid realism caught from the life which they help one to forget--
an old grey tomb in Flanders with a strange legend on it, making
one think how, perhaps, passion does live on after death; a
necklace of blue and amber beads and a broken mirror found in a
girl's grave at Rome, a marble image of a boy habited like Eros,
and with the pathetic tradition of a great king's sorrow lingering
about it like a purple shadow,--over all these the tired spirit
broods with that calm and certain joy that one gets when one has
found something that the ages never dull and the world cannot harm;
and with it comes that desire of Greek things which is often an
artistic method of expressing one's desire for perfection; and that
longing for the old dead days which is so modern, so incomplete, so
touching, being, in a way, the inverted torch of Hope, which burns
the hand it should guide; and for many things a little sadness, and
for all things a great love; and lastly, in the pinewood by the
sea, once more the quick and vital pulse of joyous youth leaping
and laughing in every line, the frank and fearless freedom of wave