s; dull, blinking, malign, or with the pert brightness of
acquisition. There were pictures too of human life so-called, silly,
romantic, insincerely posed; some fatuous allegorical things, like
ill-staged melodramas; but the strength of English art came out for
all that in the lovely landscapes, rich fields, summer streams,
far-off woodlands, beating seas; and I felt in looking at it all that
the pictures which moved one most were those which gave one a sudden
hunger for the joy and beauty of earth, not ill-imagined fantastic
places, but scenes that one has looked upon a hundred times with love
and contentment, the corn-field, the mill with its brimming leat, the
bathing-place among quiet pastures, the lake set deep in water-plants,
the old house in the twilight garden--all the things consecrated
throughout long ages by use and life and joy.

And then I strayed into the sculpture gallery; and I cannot describe
the thrill which half a dozen of the busts there gave me--faces into
which the wonder and the love and the pain of life seemed to have
passed, and which gave me a sudden sense of that strange desire to
claim a share in the past and present and future of the form and face
in which one suddenly saw so much to love. One seemed to feel hands
held out; hearts crying for understanding and affection, breath on
one's cheek, words in one's ears; and thus the whole gallery melted
into a great throng of signalling and beckoning presences, the air
dense with the voices of spirits calling to me, pressing upon me;
offering and claiming love, all bound upon one mysterious pilgrimage,
none able to linger or to stay, and yet willing to clasp one close by
the roadside, in wonder at the marvellous inscrutable power behind it
all, which at the same moment seemed to say, "Rest here, love, be
loved, enjoy," and at the same moment cried, "Go forward, experience,
endure, lament, come to an end."

There again opened before one the awful mystery of the beauty and the
grief of life, the double strain which we must somehow learn to
combine, the craving for continuance, side by side with the knowledge
of interruption and silence. If one is real, the other cannot be real!
And I for one have no doubt of which reality I hold to. Death and
silence may deceive us; life and joy cannot. There may be something
hidden beneath the seeming termination of mortal experience; indeed, I
fully believe that there is; but even if it were not so, nothing could