dvances and yet advances ...
always the shadow in front, always the reach'd hand bringing up the
laggards."

Our business, if we know that we are laggards, if we only dimly
suspect it, is not to fear the shadow, but to seize the outstretched
hands. We must grasp the smallest clue that leads out of the dark, the
resolute fight with some slovenly and ugly habit, the telling of our
mean troubles to some one whose energy we admire and whose disapproval
we dread; we must try the experiment, make the plunge; all at once we
realise that the foundations are laid, that the wall is beginning to
rise above the rubbish and the debris; we must build a home for the
new-found joy, even if as yet it only sings drowsily and faintly
within our hearts, like the awaking bird in the dewy thicket, when the
fingers of the dawn begin to raise the curtain of the night.

XXV

THE SENSE OF BEAUTY

There is one difficulty which stands at the threshold of dealing with
the sense of beauty so as to give it due importance and preponderance,
and that is that it seems with many people to be so frail a thing, and
to visit the mind only as the last grace of a mood of perfect serenity
and well-being. Many people, and those not the least thoughtful and
intelligent, find by experience that it is almost the first thing to
disappear in moments of stress and pressure. Physical pain, grief,
pre-occupation, business, anxiety, all seem to have the power of
quenching it instantaneously, until one is apt to feel that it is a
thing of infinite delicacy and tenderness, and can only co-exist with
a tranquillity which it is hard in life to secure. The result of this
no doubt is that many active-minded and forcible people are ready to
think little of it, and just regard it as a mood that may accompany a
well-earned holiday, and even so to be sparingly indulged.

It is also undoubtedly true that in many robust and energetic people
the sense of what is beautiful is so far atrophied that it can only be
aroused by scenes and places of almost melodramatic picturesqueness,
by ancient buildings clustered on craggy eminences, great valleys with
the frozen horns of mountains, wind-ravaged and snow-streaked, peering
over forest edges, the thunder and splendour of great sea-breakers
plunging landward under rugged headlands and cliff-fronts. But all
this pursuit of sensational beauty is to mistake its quality; the
moment it is thus pursued it ceases to be the milk and