ch0e

ch0a: "The features of infancy are not commonly reproduced in the adolescent portrait"
ch0b: "In spite, however, of continued shocks, which drove him from breathless flights"
ch0c: "In their relations among themselves and towards their superiors they displayed"
ch0d: "One night in early spring, standing at the foot of the staircase in the library"
ch0e: "Isolation, he had once written, is the first principle of artistic economy"
ch0f: "His soul was soaring in an air beyond the world and the body he knew was purified"
ch0g: "In calmer mood the critic in him could not but remark a strange prelude"



[last]



Isolation, he had once written, is the first principle of artistic economy but traditional and individual revelations were at that time pressing their claims and self-communion had been but shyly welcomed.



But in the intervals of friendships (for he had outridden three) he had known the sisterhood of meditative hours and now the hope began to grow up within him of finding among them that serene emotion, that certitude, which among men he had not found.



An impulse had led him forth in the dark season to silent and lonely places where the mists hung streamerwise among the trees; and as he had passed there amid the subduing night, in the secret fall of leaves, the fragrant rain, the mesh of vapours moon-transpierced, he had imagined an admonition of the frailty of all things.



In summer it had led him seaward.



Wandering over the arid grassy hills or along the strand, avowedly in quest of shellfish, he had grown almost impatient of the day.



Waders, into whose childish or girlish hair, girlish or childish dresses, the very wilfulness of the sea had entered-- even they had not fascinated.



But as day had waned it had been pleasant to watch the few last figures islanded in distant pools; and as evening deepened, the grey glow above the sea he had gone out, out among the shallow waters, the holy joys of solitude uplifting him, singing passionately to the tide.



Sceptically, cynically, mystically, he had sought for an absolute satisfaction and now little by little he began to be conscious of the beauty of mortal conditions.



He remembered a sentence in Augustine-- "It was manifested unto me that those things be good which yet are corrupted; which neither if they were supremely good, nor unless they were good could be corrupted: for had they been supremely good they would have been incorruptible but if they were not good there would be nothing in them which could be corrupted." 



A philosophy of reconcilement possible [...] as eve The [...] of the [...] at lef [...] bor lit up with dolphin lights but the lights in the chambers of the heart were unextinguished, nay, burning as for espousal...





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