forgotten fugitive impressions would come to life again, including even those which I had never been aware of.  I carry within me everything that has passed before me, and I perpetuate it with myself, and it may be that it all goes into my germs, and that all my ancestors live undiminished in me and will continue so to live, united with me, in my descendants.  And perhaps I, the whole I, with all this universe of mine, enter into each one of my actions, or, at all events, that which is essential in me enters into them—­that which makes me myself, my individual essence.

And how is this individual essence in each several thing—­that which makes it itself and not another—­revealed to us save as beauty?  What is the beauty of anything but its eternal essence, that which unites its past with its future, that element of it that rests and abides in the womb of eternity? or, rather, what is it but the revelation of its divinity?

And this beauty, which is the root of eternity, is revealed to us by love; it is the supreme revelation of the love of God and the token of our ultimate victory over time.  It is love that reveals to us the eternal in us and in our neighbours.

Is it the beautiful, the eternal, in things, that awakens and kindles our love for them, or is it our love for things that reveals to us the beautiful, the eternal, in them?  Is not beauty perhaps a creation of love, in the same way and in the same sense that the sensible world is a creation of the instinct of preservation and the supersensible world of that of perpetuation?  Is not beauty, and together with beauty eternity, a creation of love?  “Though our outward man perish,” says the Apostle, “yet the inward man is renewed day by day” (2 Cor. iv. 16).  The man of passing appearances perishes and passes away with them; the man of reality remains and grows.  “For our light affliction, which is but for a moment, worketh for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory” (ver. 17).  Our suffering causes us anguish, and this anguish, bursting because of its own fullness, seems to us consolation.  “While we look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen:  for the things which are seen are temporal; but the things which are not seen are eternal” (ver. 18).

This suffering gives hope, which is the beautiful in life, the supreme beauty, or the supreme consolation.  And since love is full of suffering, since love is compassion and pity, beauty springs from compassion and is simply the temporal consolation that compassion seeks.  A tragic consolation!  And the supreme beauty is that of tragedy.  The consciousness that everything passes away, that we ourselves pass away, and that everything that is ours and everything that environs us passes away, fills us with anguish, and this anguish itself reveals to us the consolation of that which does not pass away, of the eternal, of the beautiful.

And this beauty thus revealed, this perpetuation of momentaneity, only realizes itself practically, only lives through the work of charity.  Hope in action is charity, and beauty in action is goodness.