deserted lock, where the stonecrop grows among the masonry, and the
alders root themselves among the mouldering brickwork, the mood came
upon me, and I felt like a thirsty soul that has found a bubbling
spring coming out cool from its hidden caverns on the hot hillside. The
sight, the sound, fed and satisfied my spirit; and yet I had not known
that I had needed anything.

That it is, I will not say, a wholly capricious thing, but a thing that
depends upon a certain harmony of mood, is best proved by the fact that
the same poem or piece of music which can at one time evoke the
sensation most intensely, will at another time fail to convey the
slightest hint of charm, so that one can even wonder in a dreary way
what it could be that one had ever admired and loved. But it is this
very evanescent quality which gives me a certain sense of security. If
one reads the lives of people with strong aesthetic perceptions, such
as Rossetti, Pater, J. A. Symonds, one feels that these natures ran a
certain risk of being absorbed in delicate perception. One feels that a
sensation of beauty was to them so rapturous a thing that they ran the
risk of making the pursuit of such sensations the one object and
business of their existence; of sweeping the waters of life with busy
nets, in the hope of entangling some creature "of bright hue and sharp
fin"; of considering the days and hours that were unvisited by such
perceptions barren and dreary. This is, I cannot help feeling, a
dangerous business; it is to make of the soul nothing but a delicate
instrument for registering aesthetic perceptions; and the result is a
loss of balance and proportion, an excess of sentiment. The peril is
that, as life goes on, and as the perceptive faculty gets blunted and
jaded, a mood of pessimism creeps over the mind.

From this I am personally saved by the fact that the sense of beauty
is, as I have said, so whimsical in its movements. I should never think
of setting out deliberately to capture these sensations, because it
would be so futile a task. No kind of occupation, however prosaic,
however absorbing, seems to be either favourable to this perception, or
the reverse. It is not even like bodily health, which has its
variations, but is on the whole likely to result from a certain defined
regime of diet, exercise, and habits; and what would still more
preserve me from making a deliberate attempt to capture it would be
that it comes perhaps most poignantly an