I read Lionel’s poems on the cliffs, and almost discovered the secret of the blue.  Today for the first time I realized the remoteness of these islands, and it was a great joy.  It was a golden day of sunshine on the cliffs with blue cloudless sky over quiet waters.  Life is turning inward to the heart of silence, and out of it will come the beauty of my dream if life is willing.

July 29.

...  I met a man today who knew beauty.  He was a French country lawyer. ...  The sunset tonight revealed all the sadness of the Burning Babe.  I failed today.

July 30.

Another sadder failure of the will.  Yet beauty came in the evening.  The love of man, far more the love of God, is God in heaven descended upon earth, eternity made time in beauty, “majestic instancy,” the Word made Flesh.  The soul is the pool wherein God and we see our images, and Heaven will be the mutual contemplation of our souls.  So that human love is the adoration of God in human flesh, and therein may the beloved be seen as the image of God in time.  The praise of Our Lady should then be the praise of God.  Was this Patmore’s secret?  Or Dante’s and Petrarch’s?  “My lady was desired in the high heaven.” ...  I see now how in Heaven there is no marriage or giving in marriage.  Far flowing ramparts of a starry world!  The flammantia moenia mundi of Lucretius.  To contemplate Beauty FACE TO FACE!  What a wonderful proof of the beauty of our souls.  Twin mirrors of a single singing thought, the face of man looking into the Face of God, soul mingling with Soul in immortal music, bathed in the cool wind of Our Lady’s eyes.  Today I lost a nation in the cycle of my soul.  What is the blood but the history of my planets as engraved upon the constellations of my flesh?  It is the book of the angel of judgment for the first syllable of my song, as the emotions, the intellect, and, alas, the will, for the second, third, and fourth.  The flesh is the ebb tide from God, as the emotions are the flood.  The intellect is the second ebb, and in the will pray God that it may be flood!  The other is Hell....

July 31.

...  A victory for the will this morning. ...  Tomorrow is the first of August, and I shall enter upon my forty days.  The ringing in my ears is the ringing of my fleshly stars “toned all in Time.”  I have commenced an anthology of high imaginings more worthy than a book of essays of that title I have loved and desired to use for years,—­Flame and Dew.  If rightly done, it may do poetry one of the greatest of services by assisting it to praise Beauty on many lips in naked Light.  I wish to consecrate my work on it to that end.  Today I have been influenced by Frederick Tennyson, Traherne, and Patmore.  In agony lies the highest music.  The key is struck by circumstance, Time’s organist, and the stars tremble with music.  For the full thundering silence of Absolute Beauty a Divine Agony was necessary, so that all Heaven and