interest of beauty had
been exhausted by the logical energies of Art, which destroys where it
has rummaged, and can but discover, whether it will or no. We cannot
discover our subject matter by deliberate intellect, for when a subject
matter ceases to move us we must go elsewhere, and when it moves us,
even though it be 'that old ballad material of Shakespeare' or even 'the
morbid terror of death,' we can laugh at reason. We must not ask is the
world interested in this or that, for nothing is in question but our own
interest, and we can understand no other. Our place in the Hierarchy is
settled for us by our choice of a subject matter, and all good criticism
is hieratic, delighting in setting things above one another, Epic and
Drama above Lyric and so on, and not merely side by side. But it is our
instinct and not our intellect that chooses. We can deliberately
refashion our characters, but not our painting or our poetry. If our
characters also were not unconsciously refashioned so completely by the
unfolding of the logical energies of Art, that even simple things have
in the end a new aspect in our eyes, the Arts would not be among those
things that return for ever. The ballads that Bishop Percy gathered
returned in the _Ancient Mariner_ and the delight in the world of old
Greek sculptors sprang into a more delicate loveliness in that
archaistic head of the young athlete down the long corridor to your left
hand as you go into the British Museum. Civilisation too, will not that
also destroy where it has loved, until it shall bring the simple and
natural things again and a new Argo with all the gilding on her bows
sail out to find another fleece?

THE TRESSES OF THE HAIR

Hafiz cried to his beloved, 'I made a bargain with that brown hair
before the beginning of time, and it shall not be broken through
unending time,' and it may be that Mistress Nature knows that we have
lived many times, and that whatsoever changes and winds into itself
belongs to us. She covers her eyes away from us, but she lets us play
with the tresses of her hair.

A TOWER ON THE APENNINES

The other day I was walking towards Urbino, where I was to spend the
night, having crossed the Apennines from San Sepolcro, and had come to a
level place on the mountain-top near the journey's end. My friends were
in a carriage somewhere behind, on a road which was still ascending in
great loops, and I was alone amid a visionary, fantastic, impossible
sce