its choirs and Hell trembled in the majesty of this stricken Doom.  Death is the final chord, the passage of our full song from time to the silence of eternity.  Sleep next to death is the most terrible life that soul and body knows.  It is the center of the wheel radiating high powers to the circumference.  The speed there is terrific, so fast that it hardens, again that “majestic instancy.”  The tiniest flame is the friction of conflicting “universes.”  Beauty is alike the center and circumference of infinity, the silent wheel of omnipresent omnipotence, wherein all thoughts are not timed but eternal.  From eternity we were nothing:  to eternity we are Beauty’s image.  Is it strange that in sleep we are often given sight?

August 1.

Art is the exhibition of life in the light of eternity.  I can conceive of no other adequate critical formula.  This applies to painting, sculpture, literature and music.  Such too is the art of life,—­the exhibition to God and man of life in the light of eternity.  I have been startled to find a kinship between Wordsworth and Millet.  I found it today in a stooped old man who was traveling the roads with a walking stick and a heavy bundle of driftwood.  He was worthy of a great painter or a great poet.  By the sign of the cross one draws a magic circle round the soul which evil may not penetrate.  It places one “in the name.”  On the seashore one should lie parallel with the waves facing inland.  Then only may one advance onward with their prayer.

August 2.

It is absolutely true that only music may shape woods and fountains and the beauty of souls, for it is the only medium of expression which is pure.  Pure music is the true white magic, as black magic is music mixed with clay by human hands.  Naked Beauty alone may mix music with clay in Its own image and likeness.  Even poetry fails save in so far as it echoes the pure natural truths of music.  And all creation may flow from a flute if the player breathes a prayer.  Some day we shall have the great opera of the Incarnation and Redemption.  It is the ideal goal of music, and so of all art.  But it demands the poet, the painter, and the sculptor, too, for its actors shall be immortal statues and a living chorus singing the passion of the race against the supreme dawn and the supreme sunset.  But its greatest moments will be silence.  Christ and His Mother will live this silence in the glory of transfigured stone, and the drama will be played in the open with the stars above as orchestra, to which the human music will be but a beautiful echo.  To this Wagner and Craig point the way.  I read Patmore’s Two Infinities today with bewilderment and emphatic disagreement.  It seems absolutely lacking in vision, provincial, almost challenging Creation.  And yet it is essentially true.  Christ was a man of golden mediocrities.  He speaks of the lilies of the field, but never of stars or of planets.  And St. Francis perhaps hints