range pageant of clouds and burning light, above the leafless
grove, the bare fields, is set there for my delight But that I should
feel its inexpressible holiness, its solemn mystery--feel it with a
sense of pure tranquillity, of satisfied desire--is to me the sign that
it holds some sacred secret for me. I suppose that other men have the
same sense of sacredness and mystery about love and friendship. They
are deep and beautiful things for me, but they are things seen by the
way, and not waiting for me at the end of my pilgrimage. Music holds
within it the same sort of hidden influence as the beauty of nature. It
is not so with pictorial art, or even with writing, because the
personality, the imperfections, of the artist come in between me and
the thought. One cannot make the pigments and the words say what one
means. Even in music, the art sometimes comes between one and the thing
signified But the plain, sweet, strong chords themselves bring the
fulness of joy, just as these broken lights and ragged veils of cloud
do. I remember once going to dine at the house of a great musician; I
was a minute or two before the time, and I found him sitting in his
room at a grand piano, playing the last cadence of some simple piece,
unknown to me. He made no sign of recognition; he just finished the
strain; a lesser man would have put the sense of hospitality first, and
would have leapt up in the midst of an unfinished chord. But not till
the last echo of the last chord died away did he rise to receive me. I
felt that he was thus obeying a finer and truer instinct than if he had
made haste to end.

Everyone must find out for himself what are the holiest and most
permanent things in life, and worship them sincerely and steadfastly,
allowing no conventionality, no sense of social duty, to come in
between him and his pure apprehension. Thus, and thus only, can a man
tread the path among the stars. Thus it is, I think, that religious
persons, like artists, arrive at a certain detachment from human
affections and human aims, which is surprising and even distressing to
men whose hearts are more knit to the things of earth. Those who see in
the dearest and most intimate of human relations, the purest and
highest gift of God, will watch with a species of terror, and even
repulsion, the aloofness, the solitariness of the mystic and the
artist. It will seem to them a sort of chilly isolation, an inhuman,
even a selfish thing; just as the mys