eaning
of life, than the notion of what is beautiful. What if this conception
be narrow, what if it be simply a generalisation, a generalisation
from too few observations? What if the wish were father to the
thought?

The only test of philosophy and art is experience. And it is the
wanderer, the life-explorer without irrelevant preoccupations, who
is the true naturalist, collecting experiences and making maps for
spiritual eyes. What then does the wanderer note?

First, that the knowledge of the beautiful is an affirmation.
Something in the soul suddenly rises up and ejaculates "Yes" to some
outside phenomenon, and then he is aware that he is looking at Beauty.
As he gazes he knows himself in communion with what he sees--sometimes
that communion is a great joy and sometimes a great sadness. Thus,
looking at the opening of dawn he is filled with gladness, his spirits
rising with the sun; he wishes to shout and to sing. He is one with
the birds that have begun singing and with all wild Nature waking
refreshed after the night. But looking out at evening of the same day
over the grey sea he is failed with unutterable sorrow.

I remember how all night long in the North region, where the light
does not leave the sky, I looked out at the strange beauty of the
white night and felt all the desolateness of the world, all the
exiledom of man upon it. There was no lure, no temptation in that. The
Aeolian harp of the heart does not always discourse battle music,
and on this night it was as if an old sad minstrel sat before me and
played unendingly one plaint, the story of a lost throne, of a lost
family, lost children, a lost world. Thus a thought came to me: "We
are all the children of kings; on our spiritual bodies are royal
seals. Sometime or other we were abandoned on this beautiful garden,
the world. We expected some one to return for us; but no one came.
We lived on, and to forget homesickness devised means of pleasure,
diversions, occupations, games. Some have entirely forgotten the lost
heritage and the mystery of their abandonment; their games absorbed
them, they have become gamblers, they have theories of chance, their
talk is all of Progress of one sort or another. They forget the great
mystery of life. We tramps and wanderers remember. It is our religion
to remember, to count nothing as important beside the initial mystery.
For us it is sweeter to remember than to forget. The towns would
always have us forget, but in