but crave for something distinctly seen, entirely grasped,
perfectly developed. Because we are no longer in search of something
stimulating and exciting, something to make us glide and dart among
the surge and spray of life, but what we crave for is rather a calm
and reposeful absorption in a thought which can yield us all its
beauty, and assure us of the existence of a principle in which we can
rest and abide. As life goes on, we ought not to find relief from
tedium only in a swift interchange and multiplication of sensations;
we ought rather to attain a simple and sustained joyfulness which can
find nurture in homely and familiar things.

If again the sense of beauty is so frail a thing that it is at the
mercy of all intruding and jarring elements, it is also one of the
most patient and persistent of quiet forces. Like the darting fly
which we scare from us, it returns again and again to settle on the
spot which it has chosen. There are, it is true, troubled and anxious
hours when the beauty round us seems a cruel and intrusive thing,
mocking us with a peace which we cannot realise, and torturing us with
the reminder of the joy we have lost. There are days when the only way
to forget our misery is to absorb ourselves in some practical energy;
but that is because we have not learned to love beauty in the right
way. If we have only thought of it as a pleasant ingredient in our cup
of joy, as a thing which we can just use as we can use wine, to give
us an added flush of unreasonable content, then it will fail us when
we need it most. When a man is under the shadow of a bereavement, he
can test for himself how he has used love. If he finds that the loving
looks and words and caresses of those that are left to him are a mere
torture to him, then he has used love wrongly, just as a selfish and
agreeable delight; but if he finds strength and comfort in the
yearning sympathy of friend and beloved, reassurance in the strength
of the love that is left him, and confidence in the indestructibility
of affection, then he has used love wisely and purely, loving it for
itself, for its beauty and holiness, and not only for the warmth and
comfort it has brought him.

So, if we have loved beauty well, have seen in it a promise of
ultimate joy, a sign of a deliberate intention, a message from a power
that does not send sorrow and anxiety wantonly, cruelly and
indifferently, an assurance of something that waits to welcome and
bless us,