“But mainly life to laugh at or to fear,” I answer’d. “When emotion swells and shrinks, The spirit’s wings are moving,” she replied. “And that art moves them most, which mirrors most The life that is, and therefore is the truth. So often have I heard my father say: ‘We read of truth who spell from nature’s page; And art can best make out the meanings there; For ’tis the artist’s thought that finds each form A form of thought,—imagination’s glass That views the infinite in the finite fact. Here moves a man, you say. What see you?—man?— Nay, nay; that guise material fashions there The image only of his manliness. And you can only know his life within, As from the image you imagine it. Yon little girl that skips beside the porch,— I know her, love her, not, save as I pass Behind that face to reach a region rare Where dolls are sentient babes, and brothers kings. And yonder maidens, musing in delight, I know not, love not, till, in sacrifice, My spirit seems to yield to their desires, To wait a watchful servant unto them, To move with motives that inspire their deeds, To look through their own eyes and see their views, And thrill with rhythm when their ear-drums throb; Then, joining all with all, imagine thus The movements of their hidden inner moods. Thus too, through all of life, how know we more? All things are fitful images alone, Reflecting glory from the Absolute; And he who can imagine from the part What marks the whole, walks in the light of heaven. Find then a life where every child becomes Earth’s animated toy of manliness, Each man the mass from which to mould a god, And earth the pit whence all heaven’s wealth is mined, You find for thought a life worth living for, A life the artist gives us: it is he Discerns a spirit always veil’d in shape, A soul in man, and reason everywhere.’” XXXII. Ah, Edith, so I mused, an artist thou, Thou art indeed! but not an actress, no, Whatever may have train’d thee, save to tread The stage of truth! and Elbert’s every act Against my flinty confidence in her Struck fire and flash’d, each time I met him now; The more so, that each time I met him now, In earnest, or to stir me to distrust, He flutter’d like her fan at Edith’s beck, Her silence fill’d with subtlest flattery, Her vacant hours invaded with himself; Till all my life, at last, appear’d a plot To steal upon his absence, and then pluck Love’s fruit which once his presence only brought. XXXIII.