southwest wind, received your dust, scattering it like pollen into
space. No sign has come to me, no other sign than this I tell you now
in my long letter. It is enough. I know.

There were thus two loves, one unrecognized till afterwards, the other
realized at the time. . . . In the body there was promise. There is now
accomplishment.

It is very strange, and yet so simple. Beauty, I suppose, opens the
heart, extends the consciousness. It is a platitude, of course. You
will laugh when I tell you that afterwards I tried to reason it all
out. I am not apparently intellectual. The books I read would fill
your empty room--on aesthetics, art, and what not. I got no result
from any of them, but rather a state of muddle that was, no doubt,
congestion. None of the theories and explanations touched the root of
the matter. I am evidently not "an artist"--that at any rate I
gathered, and yet these learned people seemed to write about
something they had never "lived." I could almost believe that the
writers of these subtle analyses have never themselves felt
beauty--the burn, the rapture, the regenerating fire. They have
known, perhaps, a reaction of the physical nerves, but never this
light within the soul that lifts the horizons of the consciousness and
makes one know that God exists, that death is not even separation,
and that eternity is now.

Metaphysics I studied too. I fooled myself, thirty years after the
proper time for doing so, over the old problem whether beauty lies in
the object seen or in the mind that sees the object. And in the end I
came back hungrily to my simple starting-point--that beauty moved me.
It opened my heart to one of its many aspects--truth, wisdom, joy,