stonecrop grows among the masonry, and the alders root themselves
among the mouldering brickwork, the mood came upon me, and I felt
like a thirsty soul that has found a bubbling spring coming out
cool from its hidden caverns on the hot hillside. The sight, the
sound, fed and satisfied my spirit; and yet I had not known that I
had needed anything.

That it is, I will not say, a wholly capricious thing, but a thing
that depends upon a certain harmony of mood, is best proved by the
fact that the same poem or piece of music which can at one time
evoke the sensation most intensely, will at another time fail to
convey the slightest hint of charm, so that one can even wonder in
a dreary way what it could be that one had ever admired and loved.
But it is this very evanescent quality which gives me a certain
sense of security. If one reads the lives of people with strong
aesthetic perceptions, such as Rossetti, Pater, J. A. Symonds, one
feels that these natures ran a certain risk of being absorbed in
delicate perception. One feels that a sensation of beauty was to
them so rapturous a thing that they ran the risk of making the
pursuit of such sensations the one object and business of their
existence; of sweeping the waters of life with busy nets, in the
hope of entangling some creature "of bright hue and sharp fin"; of
considering the days and hours that were unvisited by such
perceptions barren and dreary. This is, I cannot help feeling, a
dangerous business; it is to make of the soul nothing but a
delicate instrument for registering aesthetic perceptions; and the
result is a loss of balance and proportion, an excess of sentiment.
The peril is that, as life goes on, and as the perceptive faculty
gets blunted and jaded, a mood of pessimism creeps over the mind.