Thus, in every person who truly cares for beauty, there is a necessary tendency to replace the illusory legal act of ownership by the real spiritual act of appreciation. Charles Lamb already expressed this delightfully in the essay on the old manor-house. Compared with his possession of its beauties, its walks, tapestried walls and family portraits, nay, even of the ghosts of former proprietors, the possession by the legal owner was utterly nugatory, unreal: "Mine too, Blakesmoor, was thy noble Marble Hall, with its mosaic pavements, and its twelve Caesars;... mine, too, thy lofty Justice Hall, with its one chair of authority.... Mine, too--whose else?--thy costly fruit-garden ... thy ampler pleasure-garden ... thy firry wilderness.... I was the true descendant of those old W----'s, and not the present family of that name, who had fled the old waste places." How often have not some of us felt like that; and how much might not those of us who never have, learn, could they learn, from those words of Elia? VII. I have spoken of _material, actual_ possession. But if we look closer at it we shall see that, save with regard to the things which are actually consumed, destroyed, disintegrated, changed to something else in their enjoyment, the notion of ordinary possession is a mere delusion. It can be got only by a constant obtrusion of a mere idea, the _idea of self_, and of such unsatisfactory ideas as one's right, for instance, to exclude others. 'Tis like the tension of a muscle, this constant keeping the consciousness aware by repeating "Mine--mine--_mine_ and not _theirs_; not _theirs_, but _mine_." And this wearisome act of self-assertion leaves little power for appreciation, for the appreciation which others can have quite equally, and without which there is no reality at all in ownership. Hence, the deeper our enjoyment of beauty, the freer shall we become of the dreadful delusion of exclusive appropriation, despising such unreal possession in proportion as we have tasted the real one. We shall know the two kinds of ownership too well apart to let ourselves be cozened into cumbering our lives with material properties and their responsibilities. We shall save up our vigour, not for obtaining and keeping (think of the thousand efforts and cares of ownership, even the most negative) the things which yield happy impressions, but for receiving and storing up and making capital of those impressions. We shall seek to furnish our mind with beautiful thoughts, not our houses with pretty things. VIII.