Emerson was when he said, "I the imperfect adore my own perfect."
Touch by touch, as the picture was built up, he was becoming
conscious of some interior majesty in his own nature, and it was
for himself more than for us he worked. "The oration is to the
orator," says Whitman, "and comes most back to him." The artist,
too, as he creates a beautiful form outside himself, creates
within himself, or admits to his being a nobler beauty than his
eyes have seen. His inspiration is spiritual in its origin, and
there is always in it some strange story of the glory of the King.

With man and his work we must take either a spiritual or a material
point of view. All half-way beliefs are temporary and illogical.
I prefer the spiritual with its admission of incalculable mystery
and romance in nature, where we find the infinite folded in the atom,
and feel how in the unconscious result and labor of man's hand the
Eternal is working Its will. You may say that this belongs more to
psychology than to art criticism, but I am trying to make clear to
you and to myself the relation which the mind which is in literature
may rightly bear to the vision which is art. Are literature and
ethics to dictate to Art its subjects? Is it right to demand that
the artist's work shall have an obviously intelligible message or
meaning, which the intellect can abstract from it and relate to
the conduct of life? My belief is that the most literature can do
is to help to interpret art, and that art offers to it, as nature
does, a vision of beauty, but of undefined significance.

No one asks or expects the clouds to shape themselves into ethical
forms, or the sun to shine only on the just and not on the unjust
also. It is vain to expect it, but there is something written
about the heavens declaring the beauty of the Creator and the