Produced by Delphine Lettau and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdpcanada.net This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/American Libraries. LAURUS NOBILIS BY VERNON LEE CONTENTS The Use of Beauty "Nisi Citharam" Higher Harmonies Beauty and Sanity The Art and the Country Art and Usefulness Wasteful Pleasures LAURUS NOBILIS. CHAPTERS ON ART AND LIFE. TO ANGELICA RASPONI DALLE TESTE FROM HER GRATEFUL OLD FRIEND AND NEIGHBOUR VERNON LEE. 1885-1908. Die Realitaet der Dinge ist der Dinge Werk; der Schein der Dinge ist der Menschen Werk; und ein Gemuet, das sich am Scheine weidet, ergoetzt sich schon nicht mehr an dem, was es empfaengt, sondern an dem, was es tut. SCHILLER, _Briefe ueber Aesthetik_. LAURUS NOBILIS. THE USE OF BEAUTY. I. One afternoon, in Rome, on the way back from the Aventine, the road-mender climbed onto the tram as it trotted slowly along, and fastened to its front, alongside of the place of the driver, a bough of budding bay. Might one not search long for a better symbol of what we may all do by our life? Bleakness, wind, squalid streets, a car full of heterogeneous people, some very dull, most very common; a laborious jog-trot all the way. But to redeem it all with the pleasantness of beauty and the charm of significance, this laurel branch. II. Our language does not possess any single word wherewith to sum up the various categories of things (made by nature or made by man, intended solely for the purpose of subserving by mere coincidence) which minister to our organic and many-sided aesthetic instincts: the things affecting us in that absolutely special, unmistakable, and hitherto mysterious manner expressed in our finding them _beautiful_. It is of the part which such things--whether actually present or merely shadowed in our mind--can play in our life; and of the influence of the instinct for beauty on the other instincts making up our nature, that I would treat in these pages. And for this reason I have been glad to accept from the hands of chance, and of that road-mender of the tram-way, the bay laurel as a symbol of what we have no word to express: the aggregate of all art, all poetry, and particularly of all poetic and artistic vision and emotion.