the thought to me. Only to make me miserable, for it was a waste of golden
time while the rich sunlight streamed on hill and plain. There was a
wrenching of the mind, a straining of the mental sinews; I was forced to do
this, my mind was yonder. Weariness, exhaustion, nerve-illness often
ensued. The insults which are showered on poverty, long struggle of labour,
the heavy pressure of circumstances, the unhappiness, only stayed the
expression of the feeling. It was always there. Often in the streets of
London, as the red sunset flamed over the houses, the old thought, the old
prayer, came.

Not only in grassy fields with green leaf and running brook did
this constant desire find renewal. More deeply still with
living human beauty; the perfection of form, the simple fact of
form, ravished and always willravish me away. In this lies the outcome and
end of all the loveliness of sunshine and green leaf, of flowers, pure
water, and sweet air. This is embodiment and highest ex-pression; the
scattered, uncertain, and designless loveliness of tree and sunlight brought
to shape. Through this beauty Iprayed deepest and longest, and down to this
hour. The shape--the divine idea of that shape--the swelling muscle or the
dreamy limb, strong sinew or curve of bust, Aphrodite or Hercules, it is the
same. That I may have the soul-life, the soul-nature, let divine beauty
bring to me divine soul. Swart Nubian, white Greek, delicate Italian,
massive Scandinavian, in all the exquisite pleasure the form gave, and
gives, to me immediately becomes intense prayer.

If I could have been in physical shape like these, how
despicable in comparison I am; to be shapely of form is so
infinitely beyond wealth, power, fame, all that ambition can give, that
these are dust before it. Unless of the human form, no pictures hold me;
the rest are flat surfaces. So, too, with