es complete
leave to love what we like and hate what we like and be indifferent
to what we like, as the world swings round!

I think the secret of making an exquisite use of literature so that it
shall colour and penetrate our days is only a small part of what the
wisest epicureans among us are concerned with attaining. I think it
is one of the most precious benefits conferred on us by every new
writer that he flings us back more deeply than ever upon ourselves.
We draw out of him his vision, his peculiar atmosphere, his especial
quality of mental and emotional tone. We savour this and assimilate
it and store it up, as something which we have made our own and
which is there to fall back upon when we want it. But beyond our
enjoyment of this new increment to our treasury of feeling, we are
driven inwards once more in a kind of intellectual rivalry with the
very thing we have just acquired, and in precise proportion as it has
seemed to us exciting and original we are roused in the depths of our
mind to substitute something else for it; and this something else is
nothing less than the evocation of our own originality, called up out
of the hidden caverns of our being to claim its own creative place in
the communion between our soul and the world.

I can only speak for myself; but my own preference among writers
will always be for those whose genius consists rather in creating a
certain mental atmosphere than in hammering out isolated works of
art, rounded and complete.

For a flawless work of art is a thing for a moment, while that more
penetrating projection of an original personality which one calls a
mental or aesthetic atmosphere, is a thing that floats and flows and
drifts and wavers, far beyond the boundaries of any limited creation.
Such an atmosphere, such a vague intellectual music, in the air about
us, is the thing that really challenges the responsive spirit in
ourselves; challenges it and rouses it to take the part which it has a
right to take, the part which it alone _can_ take, in recreating the
world for us in accordance with our natural fatality.

It is only by the process of gradual disillusionment that we come at
last to recognise what we ourselves--undistracted now by any
external authority--need and require from the genius of the past. For
my own part, looking over the great names included in the foregoing
essays, I am at this moment drawn instinctively only to two among
them all--to William Blake a