strengthened and developed until it has now become a dominating
influence of a distinctly personal kind.

My character has been affected, perhaps improved. You have mentioned
on several occasions that you noted in my letters a new tenderness, a
new kindness towards my fellow-creatures, less of criticism and more
of sympathy, a new love; the "birth of my poetic sense" you also
spoke of once; and I myself have long been aware of a thousand fresh
impulses towards charity and tolerance that had, hitherto, at any
rate, lain inactive in my being.

I need not flatter myself complacently, yet a change there is, and it
may be an improvement. Whether big or small, however, I am sure of
one tiling: I ascribe it entirely to this sharper and more extended
sensitiveness to Beauty, this new and exquisite receptiveness that
has established itself as a motive-power in my life. I have changed
the poet's line, using prose of course: There is beauty everywhere
and therefore joy.

And I will explain briefly, too, how it is that this copybook maxim is
now for me a practical reality. For at first, with my growing
perception, I was distressed at what seemed to me the lavish waste,
the reckless, spendthrift beauty, not in nature merely but in human
nature, that passed unrecognized and unacknowledged. The loss seemed
so extravagant. Not only that a million flowers waste their sweetness
on the desert air, but that such prodigal stores of human love and
tenderness remain unemployed, their rich harvest all
ungathered--because, misdirected and misunderstood, they find no
receptacle into which they may discharge.