l affinity of matter
and spirit, and the very life which we thrill with is its completing
third.

Artists know this deeper than brain. We regarded the elm tree with its
haggard weather-blackened limbs, and springing from it, the delicate
green foliage. It was like the background of a great painting. I brought
forth later some small reproductions of a number of famous paintings.
Among them, we found the stone and the vine often in the background, or
the branch and the leaf, pictured usually with a suggestion of running
water at the base, for action and progress and the ever-onward human
spirit. We didn't find full-leafed trees there (for that would hide the
lineaments of beauty, as the character of a face is concealed in
fatness)--but branch and leaf, the need each of the other, and the
promise of the fruit. It was the globe again--the union of the strong
and the fragile for a finer dimension of power--bow and cord, ship and
sail, man and woman, stalk and leaf, stone and vine--yes, and that which
surprised me at the beginning--that gleam of red in the wash of water
upon the greys. It was the suggestion of warmth and life brought to the
cold, inanimate hues of sand and gravel, that gave us the sense of
beauty in a wet, worn brick.

Firelight in a room is just the same thing--a grey stone fireplace with
red embers is the very heart of a winter house.... If there had not been
a vital significance back of our discovery of the day, our sense of a
brick's beauty would have been untimely and disordered....

Such were the points brought out as we walked. The episode is indicative
of the days here. The best hours are always spontaneous. I am always
occupied with my own affairs until the moment of Chapel, but Nature is
invariably safe and replete. There are a thousand analogies for every
event of the human spirit, even for the resurrection of the human soul.
The plan is one.

The day would have been poorly spent, no matter what I might say,
without an expression from the others on the beauty conception. It is
the union again of receiving and expressing that makes growth and
character. They would not try to remember what I said. Memory is not the
faculty I cared to cultivate. The endeavour here is from the spirit
outward. I do not wish to fill their brains, but to inspire their souls
to fill their own brains. All work is a training for the expression of
the real self. We are infinitely greater than our brains. If I can
arrive