sensibilities. "Thus let but a Rising of the Sun," says Carlyle, "let but
a creation of the World happen _twice,_ and it ceases to be
marvelous, to be noteworthy, or noticeable."

"Except ye become as little children!" Unless the world is
new-created every day, unless we can thrill to the beauty of nature with
its fair surfaces and harmonies of vibrant sounds, or quicken to the
throb of human life with its occupations and its play of energies, its
burdens and its joys, unless we find an answer to our needs, and
gladness, in sunlight or storms, in the sunset and evening and
solitude under the stars, in fields and hills or in thronging city streets,
in conflict and struggle or in the face of a friend, unless each new
day is a gift and new opportunity, then we cannot interpret the
meaning of life nor read the riddle of art. For we cannot truly
appreciate art except as we learn to appreciate life. Until then art has
no message for us; it is a sealed book, and we shall not open the
book nor loose the seals thereof. The meaning of life is for the spirit,
and art is its minister. To share in the communion we must become
as children. As a child uses the common things of life to his own
ends, transfiguring them by force of his creative desire, and
fashioning thus a wonderful world of his own by the exercise of his
shaping imagination, a world of limitless incident and high
adventure, so we must penetrate the visible and tangible actuality
around us, the envelope of seemingly inert matter cast in forms of
rigid definition, and we must open ourselves to the influence of
nature. That influence--nature's power to inspire, quicken, and
dilate--flowing through the channel of the senses, plays upon our
spirit. The indwelling significance of things is apprehended by the
imagination, and is won for us in the measure that we feel.

As we respond to the emotional appeal of the great universe external
to ourselves we come to realize that the material world which we see
and touch is not final. In the experience of us all there are moments
of exaltation and quickened response, moments of illumination
when--

"with an eye made quiet by the power
Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,
We see into the life of things."

The "life of things" is their significance for the spirit. By spirit I
mean the sum of our conscious being, that complete entity within us
which we recognize as the self. The material world, external, vi