d-twenty he had conquered the habit, and I was not born till
he was almost sixty-one! yet I had inherited it. We never referred to
it again, and in two years I, also, had conquered it.

We spent the winter of the year in which I was seventeen in Italy, to
which country a near relative was Ambassador, and there I went to
my first ball. That night--and how often afterwards!--I knew the
surging exultation, the intoxication of the joy of life. How often in
social life, in brilliant scenes of light and laughter, music and love, I
seemed to ride on the crest of a wave, in the marvellous glamour of
youth!

This love of the world and of social life was a very strong feeling for
many years: at the same time and running, as it were, in double
harness with it was a necessity for solitude. My mind imperatively
demanded this, and indeed my heart too.

It was during this year that I first commenced a new form of mental
pleasure through looking at the beautiful in Nature. Not only
solitude, but total silence was necessary for this pastime, and, if
possible, beauty and a distant view: failing a view I could
accomplish it by means of the beauties of the sky. This form of
mental pleasure was the exact opposite of my previous dreamings,
for all imagination absolutely ceased, all forms, all pictures, all
activities disappeared--the very scene at which I looked had to
vanish before I could know the pleasure of this occupation in which,
in some mysterious manner, I inhaled the very essence of the
Beautiful.

At first I was only able to remain in this condition for a few
moments at a time, but that satisfied me--or, rather, did not satisfy
me, for through it all ran a strange unaccountable anguish--a pain of
longing--which, like a high, fine, tremulous nerve, ran through the
joy. What induced me to pursue this habit, I never asked myself.
That it was a form of the spirit's struggle towards the Eternal--of the
soul's great quest of God--never occurred to me. I was worshipping
the Beautiful without giving sufficient thought to Him from Whom
all beauty proceeds. Half a lifetime was to go by before I realised to
what this habit was leading me--that it was the first step towards the
acquirement of that most exquisite of all blessings--the gift of the
Contemplation of God. Ah, if anyone knows in his heart the call of
the Beautiful, let him use it towards this glorious end! Love, and the
Beautiful--these are the twin golden paths that lead us a