tion of statue or picture or poem, is this evolving from out of
ourselves of vague beauty and goodness: our fancy and our feelings do
not create anything enduring, but they are active, they create. You
artists, you poets must be broad awake, for you can and are bound to
give to us the sober realities of beauty; but we who cannot, we can yet
sometimes dream, if but for a moment, of an intangible, vague fairyland;
and of this we must not be cheated. Out of the broken, fragmentary
realities of life there must arise, ever and again for all of us,
strange involuntary visions, which have greater power over us, more
charm for us, than all the art in the world. And of such things art has
no right to be jealous; they are beyond it. And thus, I will confess to
you, as I fasten together these last pages of my book, and rise from the
grass, sere in the sunshine, and sprinkled with daisies in the shadow
of each tree, I will confess to you that more nearly appealing to me,
dearer also, than antique bas-relief or song of Mozart, has been the
vague remembrance, evoked by trivial word or sight, of that early winter
afternoon on the ilex girded battlements of Belcaro, looking down upon
the sere oak-woods, flushed by the low sun, upon the hazy olive slopes
and walls and towers of Siena. And, moreover, I will even confess (as
severest self-chastisement to a writer on art, as complete expiation of
aesthetic dogmatism and fantastications), while we walk across the warm
grass and out through the low archway of black and flakewise crumbling
stone, that I foresee that many a time in the future there will arise
between me and the fresco or picture at which I am looking, a vision
of this old world garden, of the ivied chapel buttress, the flowering
lime, the daisied grass, the copper beech leaves, ruddy and diaphanous,
against the pale, moist English sky; that, sometimes, there will
come into my head something--something ill-defined, pleasurable,
painful--which will make me read only with my eyes; which will make me
(worst humiliation) lose the thread of my theories, of my thoughts, of
my sentence. And, after this confession, I think I can say no more.

OXFORD, _July 21, 1881._

_S. Cowan and Co., Strathmore Press, Perth._

TRANSCRIBER'S NOTE

In a very few cases, missing punctuation has been added, mainly full
stops. Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.

On the whole, Vernon Lee's quirky spellings have been retained;