ations, when the orchestra is at work, the
great droning horns with their hollow reluctant voices sustaining the
shiver and ripple of the strings; or by sweeter, simpler cadences
played at evening, when the garden scents wafted out of the fragrant
dusk, the shaded lamps, the listening figures, all weave themselves
together into a mysterious tapestry of the sense, till we wonder what
strange and beautiful scene is being enacted, and wherever we turn,
catch hints and echoes of some bewildering and gracious secret, just
not revealed!

Some find it in pictures and statues, the mellow liquid pageant of
some old master-hand, a stretch of windspent moor, with its leaning
grasses and rifted crags, a dark water among glimmering trees at
twilight, a rich plain running to the foot of haze-hung mountains, the
sharp-cut billows of a racing sea; or a statue with its shapely limbs
and its veiled smile, or of the suspended strength of some struggling
Titan: all these hold the same inexplicable appeal to the senses,
indicating the efforts of spirits who have seen, and loved, and
admired, and hoped, and desired, striving to leave some record of the
joy that thrilled and haunted, and almost tortured them; and to many
people the emotion comes most directly through the words and songs of
poetry, that tell of joys lived through, and sorrows endured, of hopes
that could not be satisfied, of desires that could not know
fulfilment; pictures, painted in words, of scenes such as we ourselves
have moved through in old moods of delight, scenes from which the
marvellous alchemy of memory has abstracted all the base and dark
elements, leaving only the pure gold of remembered happiness--the wide
upland with the far-off plain, the garden flooded with sun, the
grasses crisped with frost, the snow-laden trees, the flaming autumn
woods, the sombre forest at shut of day, when the dusk creeps
stealthily along the glimmering aisles, the stream passing clear among
large-leaved water-plants and spires of bloom; and the mood goes
deeper still, for it echoes the marching music of the heart, its
glowing hopes, its longing for strength and purity and peace, its
delight in the nearness of other hearts, its wisdom, its nobility.

But the end and aim of all these various influences is the same; their
power lies in the fact that they quicken in the spirit the sense of
the energy, the delight, the greatness of life, the share that we can
claim in them, the largeness