This is a most persistent experience, and Beauty thereby promises us happiness, but in a strange way seems to tell of happiness past.  It lures not forward unless to the exploration of the “prison-house” once more.

Even the beauty of woman is not always a lure.  There is a beauty in woman which makes one glad, but there is the beauty that haunts one like a great sadness, besides the beauty that draws one nearer to her.  There is the seductive beauty of Cleopatra, but there is also the almost repulsive beauty of Medea, and besides both there is the mysterious beauty of Helen or of Eve.

Beauty is also a great possession, and that is another conception, another mystery.  We lie like a mirror in the presence of Beauty, and it builds the very temple of our souls.  Beauty is the gold of earthly experience.  It is essentially that which in looking round our eyes like best, that which they say swiftly “Yes” to.  We enter into communion with the beautiful as with a beloved object.  We make it part of ourselves.  We absorb it into that which is integral and immortal—­our very essence.  “A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:  its loveliness can never pass away” is a truth of experience, not the idle fancy of the poet.  For to have seen the beautiful is not inconsequential, it is not even a responsibility entirely your own; the beautiful thing has also seen you.  Henceforth your life can never be quite the same, and the beautiful thing looked upon has either become less or more beautiful.

VII

A STILL-CREATION-DAY

The blue-green sea is living velvet, and full of light-rings; it goes out to a distant mauve horizon, near which sea-gulls with white gleaming wings are flying.  Many gulls are fluttering on the red buoys in the water.

It is late in a December afternoon on the south coast of the Crimea.  It is Yalta, beloved of all Russians, and I have come tramping to it—­which Russians never do—­and I am intending to spend lazy days looking with the gay town and all its white villas at the glorious spectacle of the southern sea.  All the rest of Russia is gripped by winter, but here there is sanctuary and forgiveness.  I have been tramping on the cold, cold steppes, frozen, forced to get back into myself and hide like the trees, and when I came here it seemed somehow as if Nature herself had been angry with me, relented, and was now showing me all her tenderness again.  All along the road I found violets in the little bushes, and I wore them as a forgiveness gift from a woman that I love.

When a woman smiles upon a man she bids him live, and when she frowns he can but die.  To-day the woman of all women has smiled on me, Nature herself.

Along the road I had that pleasant life with myself that one has the day after one’s birthday, when one has kept good resolutions two days.  My old self carried, as it were, within me a little child, and the child chattered and lisped to me.