relations established
throughout the whole process of human and, perhaps, even of animal,
evolution; relations seated in the depths of our activities, but
radiating upwards even like our vague, organic sense of comfort and
discomfort; and permeating, even like our obscure relations with
atmospheric conditions, into our highest and clearest consciousness,
colouring and altering the whole groundwork of our thoughts and
feelings.

Such is the primordial, and, in a sense, the cosmic power of the
Beautiful; a power whose very growth, whose constantly more complex
nature proclaims its necessary and beneficial action in human
evolution. It is the power of making human beings live, for the
moment, in a more organically vigorous and harmonious fashion, as
mountain air or sea-wind makes them live; but with the difference that
it is not merely the bodily, but very essentially the spiritual life,
the life of thought and emotion, which is thus raised to unusual
harmony and vigour. I may illustrate this matter by a very individual
instance, which will bring to the memory of each of my readers the
vivifying power of some beautiful sight or sound or beautiful
description. I was seated working by my window, depressed by the
London outlook of narrow grey sky, endless grey roofs, and rusty elm
tops, when I became conscious of a certain increase of vitality,
almost as if I had drunk a glass of wine, because a band somewhere
outside had begun to play. After various indifferent pieces, it began
a tune, by Handel or in Handel's style, of which I have never known
the name, calling it for myself the _Te Deum_ Tune. And then it seemed
as if my soul, and according to the sensations, in a certain degree my
body even, were caught up on those notes, and were striking out as if
swimming in a great breezy sea; or as if it had put forth wings and
risen into a great free space of air. And, noticing my feelings, I
seemed to be conscious that those notes were being played _on me_, my
fibres becoming the strings; so that as the notes moved and soared and
swelled and radiated like stars and suns, I also, being identified
with the sound, having become apparently the sound itself, must needs
move and soar with them.

We can all recollect a dozen instances when architecture, music,
painting, or some sudden sight of sea or mountain, have thus affected
us; and all poetry, particularly all great lyric poetry, Goethe's,
Shelley's, Wordsworth's, and, above all,