The man who could not write his
thought of beauty in his life,--the materials of whose life
would not work up into poetry,--wrote it in stone, drew it on
canvas, breathed it in music, or built it in lofty rhyme. In
this statement, however, she guarded her meaning, and said
that to seek beauty was to miss it often. We should only seek
to live as harmoniously with the great laws as our social and
other duties permitted, and solace ourselves with poetry and
the fine arts."
I find a further record by the same friendly scribe, which seems a
second and enlarged account of the introductory conversation, or else
a sketch of the course of thought which ran through several meetings,
and which very naturally repeated occasionally the same thoughts. I
give it as I find it:--
"She then recurred to the last year's conversations; and,
first, the Grecian mythologies, which she looked at as
symbolical of a deeper intellectual and aesthetic life than
we were wont to esteem it, when looking at it from a narrow
religious point of view. We had merely skimmed along the
deeper study. She spoke of the conversations on the different
part played by Inspiration and Will in the works of man, and
stated the different views of inspiration,--how some had felt
it was merely perception; others apprehended it as influx upon
the soul from the soul-side of its being.
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