-and this will interest you more particularly--the emotion
produced in me was, so far as positive recognition went, a new
emotion; it was, at any rate, one that had lain so feebly in me
hitherto that its announcement brought the savour of an emotion
before unrealized. I had known it but once, and that long
years before, but the man's mind in me increased and added to it. For
it seemed a development of that new perception which first dawned
upon me during my brief period of married life, and had since lain
hidden in me, potential possibly, but inactive beyond all question,
if not wholly dead. I will now name it for you, and for myself, as
best I may. It was the Thrill of Beauty.

I became, in these moments, aware of Beauty, and to a degree, while it
lasted, approaching revelation. Chords, first faintly struck long
years before when my sense of Marion's forgiveness and generosity
stirred worship in me, but chords that since then had lain,
apparently, unresponsive, were swept into resonance again. Possibly
they had been vibrating all these intervening years, unknown to me,
unrecognized. I cannot say. I only know that here was the origin of
the strange energy that now moved me to the depths. Some new worship
of Beauty that had love in it, of which, indeed, love was the
determining quality, awoke in the profoundest part of me, and even
when the "thrill" had gone its way, left me hungry and yearning for
its repetition. Here, then, is the "personal" qualification that I
mentioned. The yearning and the hunger were related to my deepest
needs. I had been empty, but I would be filled. For a passionate
love, holding hands with a faith and confidence as passionate as
itself, poured flooding into me and made this new sense of beauty seem
a paramount necessity of my life.

Will you be patient now, if I give you a crude instance of what I
mean? It is one among many others, but I choose it because its very
crudeness makes my meaning clear.

In this fevered and stricken African coast, you may know, there is
luxuriance in every natural detail, an exuberance that is lavish to
excess. Yet beauty lies somewhat coyly hid--as though suffocated by
over-abundance of crowding wonder. I detect, indeed, almost a touch
of the monstrous in it all, a super-expression, as it were, that
bewilders, and occasionally even may alarm. Delicacy, subtlety,
suggestion in any form, have no part in it. During the five years of
my exile amid this tropical e