beloved. He has a great white beard, and the profile of Homer, and a
laugh that brings the roof down. He has wasted all his money on two
great objects: to help others, and on alchemy. He holds huge courts
every day in his garden of all the learned men of all religions--Rajahs
and beggars and saints, and downright villains, all delightfully mixed
up, and all treated as one. And then his alchemy! Oh dear, night and day
the experiments are going on, and every man who brings a new
prescription is welcome as a brother. But this alchemy is, you know,
only the material counterpart of a poet's craving for Beauty, the
eternal Beauty. "The makers of gold and the makers of verse," they are
the twin creators that sway the world's secret desire for mystery; and
what in my father is the genius of curiosity--the very essence of all
scientific genius--in me is the desire for beauty. Do you remember
Pater's phrase about Leonardo da Vinci, "curiosity and the desire of
beauty"?'

It was the desire of beauty that made her a poet; her 'nerves of
delight' were always quivering at the contact of beauty. To those who
knew her in England, all the life of the tiny figure seemed to
concentrate itself in the eyes; they turned towards beauty as the
sunflower turns towards the sun, opening wider and wider until one saw
nothing but the eyes. She was dressed always in clinging dresses of
Eastern silk, and, as she was so small, and her long black hair hung
straight down her back, you might have taken her for a child. She spoke
little, and in a low voice, like gentle music; and she seemed, wherever
she was, to be alone.

Through that soul I seemed to touch and take hold upon the East. And
first there was the wisdom of the East. I have never known any one who
seemed to exist on such 'large draughts of intellectual day' as this
child of seventeen, to whom one could tell all one's personal troubles
and agitations, as to a wise old woman. In the East maturity comes
early; and this child had already lived through all a woman's life. But
there was something else, something hardly personal, something which
belonged to a consciousness older than the Christian, which I realised,
wondered at, and admired, in her passionate tranquillity of mind, before
which everything mean and trivial and temporary caught fire and burnt
away in smoke. Her body was never without suffering, or her heart
without conflict; but neither the body's weakness nor the heart's
violence