of a friend's death,
fall a-musing and continue musing until the fire kindles, and
they ask 'What did So-and-so die worth?' or sometimes, more
wisely than they know, 'What did poor old So-and-so die worth?'
or again, more colloquially, 'What did So-and-so "cut up" for?'
Neither is it that which more disinterested economists used to
teach; men never (I fear me) loved, but anyhow lost awhile, who
for my green unknowing youth, at Thebes or Athens--growing older
I tend to forget which is, or was, which--defined the Value of a
thing as its 'purchasing power' which the market translates into
'price.' For--to borrow a phrase which I happened on, the other
day, with delight, in the Introduction to a translation of
Lucian--there may be forms of education less paying than the
commercial and yet better worth paying for; nay, above payment or
computation in price[1].

No: the particular meaning I use to-day is that which artists use
when they talk of painting or of music. To see things, near or
far, in their true perspective and proportions; to judge them
through distance; and fetching them back, to reproduce them in
art so proportioned comparatively, so rightly adjusted, that they
combine to make a particular and just perspective: that is to
give things their true _Values._

Suppose yourself reclining on a bank on a clear day, looking up
into the sky and watching the ascent of a skylark while you
listen to his song. That is a posture in which several poets of
repute have placed themselves from time to time: so we need not
be ashamed of it. Well, you see the atmosphere reaching up and
up, mile upon mile. There are no milestones planted there. But,
wave on wave perceptible, the atmosphere stretches up through
indeterminate distances; and according as your painter of the sky
can translate these distances, he gives his sky what is called
_Value._

You listen to the skylark's note rising, spiral by spiral, on
'the very jet of earth':

As up he wings the spiral stair,
A song of light, and pierces air
With fountain ardour, fountain play,
To reach the shining tops of day:

and you long for the musical gift to follow up and up the
delicate degrees of distance and thread the notes back as the
bird ascending drops them--on a thread, as it were, of graduated
beads, half music and half dew:

That was the chirp of Ariel
You heard, as overhead it flew,
The farther going more to dwell
And wing our