and love--and what else, in the name of heaven, mattered!

I sold the books at miserable prices that made Mother question my
judgment: coloured plates, costly bindings, rare editions, and all.
Aesthetics, Art, rules and principles might go hang for all I cared
or any good they did me. It was intellect that had devised all these.
The truth was simpler far. I cared nothing for these scholarly
explanations of beauty's genesis and laws of working, because I felt
it. Hunger needs no analysis, does it? Nor does Love. Could anything
be more stultifying? Give to the first craving a lump of bread, and
to the second a tangible man or woman--and let those who have the
time analyse both cravings at their leisure.

For the thrill I mean is never physical, and has nothing in common
with that acute sensation experienced when the acrobat is seen to
miss the rope in mid-air as he swings from bar to bar. There is no
shock in it, for shock is of the nerves, arresting life; the thrill I
speak of intensifies and sets it rising in a wave that flows. It is of
the spirit. It wounds, yet marvellously. It is unearthly. Therein, I
think, lies its essential quality; by chance, as it were, in writing
this intimate confession, I have hit upon the very word: it is
unearthly, it contains surprise. Yes, Beauty wounds marvellously,
then follows the new birth, regeneration. There is a ravishment of
the entire being into light and knowledge.

The element of surprise is certainly characteristic. The thrill comes
unheralded--a sudden uprush of convincing joy loosed from some store
that is inexhaustible. Unlike the effect of a nervous shock which can
be lived over and reconstituted, it knows no repetition; its climax
is instantaneous, there is neither increase nor declension; it is