The sense of
beauty is then of its nature accompanied by sadness; it is essentially
evanescent. A beautiful thing with which we grow familiar stands often
before us dumb and inarticulate, with no appeal to the spirit. Then
perhaps in a sudden movement, the door of the spirit is unlatched, and
the soul for a moment discerns the sweet essence, to which an instant
before it had been wholly unresponsive, and which an instant later will
lose its power. It seems to point to a possible satisfaction; and yet
it owes its poignancy to the fact that the heart is still unsatisfied.
XXVI
I once wrote and published a personal and intimate book; it was a
curious experience. There was a certain admixture of fiction in it, but
in the main it was a confession of opinions; for various reasons the
book had a certain vogue, and though it was published anonymously, the
authorship was within my own circle detected. I saw several reviews of
it, and I was amused to find that the critics perspicuously conjectured
that because it was written in the first person it was probably
autobiographical. I had several criticisms made on it by personal
friends: some of them objected to the portraiture of persons in it
being too life-like, selecting as instances two characters who were
entirely imaginary; others objected to the portraiture as not being
sufficiently life-like, and therefore tending to mislead the reader.
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