Bodily I am also pagan in the freedom of my owned sex feelings--as are all women. Most of them do not know it and those who do hide it in a tomb-like silence, except the brazen, the headlongly honest and the artlessly frank. I come under none of those heads. I am myself. I live and ponder alone. And my Body feels consciously aloof and as a someway separate individual: with inner organs as eternal hopes, smooth skin as emotion and drops of blood as thoughts--little drops of sparkling red virile sweet blood for its thoughts. I so _love_ my Body as it lives and breathes and moves about, with me and close to me. It is my so constant companion. It is an attractive girl, a human being of some charm. I love it for the priceless air it breathes and the long jewel-days of sunshine it has known: for the tiny wears and tears of its daily life--the rending of its magic tissues with each going-up-or-down-stairs, each crossing of a door-sill. I love it for that it must lie at last pale, pale and still--still--still--in its grave. I love my Body for its woman-complexities of sex. I love it for the lonely lyric poetry of its cell-adventures. I love my Body for this long journey of woe and loveliness which it goes, from Birthday to Death-day, in wilding passions of subtle nervousness: each day a day of bodily beauty and intolerableness and fear and utter mystery: because life _is_, and because I own a white smooth-skinned Body, and because the strange, strange Air of Everyday breathes on it--touches it--always! _Sincerity and despair_ To-morrow I am a true Artist, not as a writer but as a writing-person. I try to feel myself literarily a poet--finer-made than a god. But I fail as a poet-litterateur as I fail as a poet-person. A poet flies always on wings of fiery gold though it might be waywardly. But often I walk with my feet in odd gutters, and have some plaisance in them, and analyze their gutteriness absorbedly and own them as part of my portion. --poet or no poet, it is best to be myself. In heights and murks and widths and trivial horrors, _myself_-- But as an Artist I am in the true. As a painter of words and maker of paragraphs which picture my phases and emotions, and in my conscious feeling anent it, I realize the artist _flair_, the artist temper. It is not a literary but a personal art. I have what goes with all artist-matter--long periods of dry-rot when having nothing ripe to write I write nothing. My Artist-spirit proves itself, justifies itself in my times of stagnation and reaction. Out of it something human and sad and lustrous grows in me, something which is half worldly but awaits its ripe time of expression with someway-divine scorn.