e have only to stake out our claim; and then, if
we persevere, we shall find that our _Joyous Gard_ is really rising
into the air about us--where else should we build our castles?--with
all the glory of tower and gable, of curtain-wall and battlement,
terrace and pleasaunce, hall and corridor; our own self-built
paradise; and then perhaps the knight, riding lonely from the sunset
woods, will turn in to keep us company, and the wandering minstrel
will bring his harp; and we may even receive other visitors, like the
three that stood beside the tent of Abraham in the evening, in the
plain of Mamre, of whom no one asked the name or lineage, because the
answer was too great for mortal ears to hear.

VII

INTERPRETATION

Is the secret of life then a sort of literary rapture, a princely
thing, only possible through costly outlay and jealously selected
hours, like a concert of stringed instruments, whose players are
unknown, bursting on the ear across the terraces and foliaged walls of
some enchanted garden? By no means! That is the shadow of the artistic
nature, that the rare occasions of life, where sound and scent and
weather and sweet companionship conspire together, are so exquisite,
so adorable, that the votary of such mystical raptures begins to plan
and scheme and hunger for these occasions, and lives in discontent
because they arrive so seldom.

No art, no literature, are worth anything at all unless they send one
back to life with a renewed desire to taste it and to live it.
Sometimes as I sit on a sunny day writing in my chair beside the
window, a picture of the box-hedge, the tall sycamores, the
stone-tiled roof of the chapel, with the blue sky behind, globes
itself in the lense of my spectacles, so entrancingly beautiful, that
it is almost a disappointment to look out on the real scene. We like
to see things mirrored thus and framed, we strangely made creatures of
life; why, I know not, except that our finite little natures love to
select and isolate experiences from the mass, and contemplate them so.
But we must learn to avoid this, and to realise that if a particle of
life, thus ordered and restricted, is beautiful, the thing itself is
more beautiful still. But we must not depend helplessly upon the
interpretations, the skilled reflections, of finer minds than our own.
If we learn from a wise interpreter or poet the quality and worth of a
fraction of life, it is that we may gain from him the power to