That it is, I will not say, a wholly capricious thing, but a thing that depends upon a certain harmony of mood, is best proved by the fact that the same poem or piece of music which can at one time evoke the sensation most intensely, will at another time fail to convey the slightest hint of charm, so that one can even wonder in a dreary way what it could be that one had ever admired and loved.  But it is this very evanescent quality which gives me a certain sense of security.  If one reads the lives of people with strong aesthetic perceptions, such as Rossetti, Pater, J. A. Symonds, one feels that these natures ran a certain risk of being absorbed in delicate perception.  One feels that a sensation of beauty was to them so rapturous a thing that they ran the risk of making the pursuit of such sensations the one object and business of their existence; of sweeping the waters of life with busy nets, in the hope of entangling some creature “of bright hue and sharp fin”; of considering the days and hours that were unvisited by such perceptions barren and dreary.  This is, I cannot help feeling, a dangerous business; it is to make of the soul nothing but a delicate instrument for registering aesthetic perceptions; and the result is a loss of balance and proportion, an excess of sentiment.  The peril is that, as life goes on, and as the perceptive faculty gets blunted and jaded, a mood of pessimism creeps over the mind.

From this I am personally saved by the fact that the sense of beauty is, as I have said, so whimsical in its movements.  I should never think of setting out deliberately to capture these sensations, because it would be so futile a task.  No kind of occupation, however prosaic, however absorbing, seems to be either favourable to this perception, or the reverse.  It is not even like bodily health, which has its variations, but is on the whole likely to result from a certain defined regime of diet, exercise, and habits; and what would still more preserve me from making a deliberate attempt to capture it would be that it comes perhaps most poignantly and insistently of all when I am uneasy, overstrained, and melancholy.  No! the only thing to do is to live one’s life without reference to it, to be thankful when it comes, and to be contented when it is withdrawn.

I sometimes think that a great deal of stuff is both written and talked about the beauties of nature.  By this I do not mean for a moment that nature is less beautiful than is supposed, but that many of the rapturous expressions one hears and sees used about the enjoyment of nature are very insincere; though it is equally true on the other hand that a great deal of genuine admiration of natural beauty is not expressed, perhaps hardly consciously felt.  To have a true and deep appreciation of nature demands a certain poetical force, which is rare; and a great many people who have a considerable power of expression, but little originality, feel bound to expend a portion of this upon expressing an admiration for nature which they do not so much actually feel as think themselves bound to feel, because they believe that people in general expect it of them.