moment of heedless sentiment the wish that we might have again one of
our talks of long-past days, over the purposes and methods of our art.
And my friend, wiser than I, as he has always been, replied with this
doubting phrase "Could we recapture the zest of that old time?"

I would not like to believe that our faith in the value of imaginative
art has diminished, that we think it less worth while to struggle for
glimpses of truth and for the words which may pass them on to other
eyes; or that we can no longer discern the star we tried to follow; but
I do fear, with him, that half a lifetime of endeavour has dulled the
exuberance which kept one up till morning discussing the ways and means
of aesthetic achievement. We have discovered, perhaps with a certain
finality, that by no talk can a writer add a cubit to his stature, or
change the temperament which moulds and colours the vision of life he
sets before the few who will pause to look at it. And so--the rest is
silence, and what of work we may still do will be done in that dogged
muteness which is the lot of advancing years.

Other times, other men and modes, but not other truth. Truth, though
essentially relative, like Einstein's theory, will never lose its
ever-new and unique quality-perfect proportion; for Truth, to the human
consciousness at least, is but that vitally just relation of part to
whole which is the very condition of life itself. And the task before
the imaginative writer, whether at the end of the last century or all
these aeons later, is the presentation of a vision which to eye and ear
and mind has the implicit proportions of Truth.

I confess to have always looked for a certain flavour in the writings of
others, and craved it for my own, believing that all true vision is so
coloured by the temperament of the seer, as to have not only the just