his neighbour, harmonic enriching harmonic by stimulating fresh
vibration.

If, then, we wish to possess casts, copies, or photographs of certain
works of art, this is, aesthetically considered, exactly as we wish to
have the means--railway tickets, permissions for galleries, and so
forth--of seeing certain pictures or statues as often as we wish. For
we feel that the images in our mind require renewing, or that, in
combination with other more recently acquired images, they will, if
renewed, yield a new kind of delight. But this is quite another matter
from wishing to own the material object, the thing we call _work of
art itself_, forgetting that it is a work of art only for the soul
capable of instating it as such.

Thus, in every person who truly cares for beauty, there is a necessary
tendency to replace the illusory legal act of ownership by the real
spiritual act of appreciation. Charles Lamb already expressed this
delightfully in the essay on the old manor-house. Compared with his
possession of its beauties, its walks, tapestried walls and family
portraits, nay, even of the ghosts of former proprietors, the
possession by the legal owner was utterly nugatory, unreal:

"Mine too, Blakesmoor, was thy noble Marble Hall, with its mosaic
pavements, and its twelve Caesars;... mine, too, thy lofty Justice
Hall, with its one chair of authority.... Mine, too--whose
else?--thy costly fruit-garden ... thy ampler pleasure-garden ...
thy firry wilderness.... I was the true descendant of those old
W----'s, and not the present family of that name, who had fled the
old waste places."

How often have not some of us felt like that; and how much might not
those of us who never have, learn, could they learn, from those words
of Elia?

VII.

I have spoken of _material, actual_ possession. But if we look closer
at it we shall see that, save with regard to the things which are
actually consumed, destroyed, disintegrated, changed to something else
in their enjoyment, the notion of ordinary possession is a mere
delusion. It can be got only by a constant obtrusion of a mere idea,
the _idea of self_, and of such unsatisfactory ideas as one's right,
for instance, to exclude others. 'Tis like the tension of a muscle,
this constant keeping the consciousness aware by repeating
"Mine--mine--_mine_ and not _theirs_; not _theirs_, but _mine_." And
this wearisome act of self-assertion leaves little power for
a