beauty, ever changing, perishing, ever renewing itself.  In spring the copse is full of tender points of green, uncrumpling and uncurling.  The hyacinths make a carpet of steely blue, the anemones weave their starred tapestry.  In the summer, the grove hides its secret, dense with leaf, the heavy-seeded grass rises in the field, the tall flowering plants make airy mounds of colour; in autumn, the woods blaze with orange and gold, the air is heavy with the scent of the dying leaf.  In winter, the eye dwells with delight upon the spare low tints; and when the snow falls and lies, as it does to-day, the whole scene has a still and mournful beauty, a pure economy of contrasted light and gloom.  Yet the trained perception of the artist does not dwell upon the thought of the place as upon a perpetual feast of beauty and delight.  Rather, it shames me to reflect, one dwells upon it as a quarry of effects, where one can find and detach the note of background, the sweet symbol that will lend point and significance to the scene that one is labouring at.  Instead of being content to gaze, to listen, to drink in, one thinks only what one can carry away and make one’s own.  If one’s art were purely altruistic, if one’s aim were to emphasise some sweet aspect of nature which the careless might otherwise overlook or despise; or even if the sight haunted one like a passion, and fed the heart with hope and love, it would be well.  But does one in reality feel either of these purposes?  Speaking candidly, I do not.  I care very little for my message to the world.  It is true that I have a deep and tender love for the gracious things of earth; but I cannot be content with that.  One thinks of Wordsworth, rapt in contemplation, sitting silent for a whole morning, his eyes fixed upon the pool of the moorland stream, or the precipice with the climbing ashes.  It was like a religion to him, a communion with something holy and august which in that moment drew near to his soul.  But with me it is different.  To me the passion is to express it, to embalm it, in phrase or word, not for my pride in my art, not for any desire to give the treasure to others, but simply, so it seems, in obedience to a tyrannous instinct to lend the thought, the sight, another shape.  I despair of defining the feeling.  It is partly a desire to arrest the fleeting moment, to give it permanence in the ruinous lapse of things, the same feeling that made old Herrick say to the daffodils, “We weep to see you haste away so soon.”  Partly the joy of the craftsman in making something that shall please the eye and ear.  It is not the desire to create, as some say, but to record.  For when one writes an impassioned scene, it seems no more an act of creation than one feels about one’s dreams.  The wonder of dreams is that one does not make them; they come upon one with all the pleasure of surprise and experience.  They are there; and so, when one indulges imagination, one does not make, one merely tells the dream.