to the motive that it served. What stood erect in you, has withered. A little “palm-tree of turned wood” informs your once spontaneous core in its immutable reduction. TO A STEAM ROLLER The illustration is nothing to you without the application. You lack half wit. You crush all the particles down into close conformity, and then walk back and forth on them. Sparkling chips of rock are crushed down to the level of the parent block. Were not “impersonal judgment in æsthetic matters, a metaphysical impossibility,” you might fairly achieve it. As for butterflies, I can hardly conceive of one’s attending upon you, but to question the congruence of the complement is vain, if it exists. DILIGENCE IS TO MAGIC AS PROGRESS IS TO FLIGHT With an elephant to ride upon—“with rings on her fingers and bells on her toes,” she shall outdistance calamity anywhere she goes. Speed is not in her mind inseparable from carpets. Locomotion arose in the shape of an elephant, she clambered up and chose to travel laboriously. So far as magic carpets are concerned, she knows that although the semblance of speed may attach to scarecrows of æsthetic procedure, the substance of it is embodied in such of those tough-grained animals as have outstripped man’s whim to suppose them ephemera, and have earned that fruit of their ability to endure blows, which dubs them prosaic necessities—not curios. THOSE VARIOUS SCALPELS Those various sounds consistently indistinct, like intermingled echoes struck from thin glass successively at random—the inflection disguised: your hair, the tails of two fighting-cocks head to head in stone—like sculptured scimitars re- peating the curve of your ears in reverse order: your eyes, flowers of ice and snow sown by tearing winds on the cordage of disabled ships: your raised hand an ambiguous signature: your cheeks, those rosettes of blood on the stone floors of French châteaux, with regard to which guides are so affirmative: your other hand a bundle of lances all alike, partly hid by emeralds from Persia and the fractional magnificence of Florentine goldwork—a collection of half a dozen little objects made fine with enamel in gray, yellow, and dragonfly blue: a lemon, a pear and three bunches of grapes, tied with silver: your dress, a magnificent square cathedral of uniform and at the same time, diverse appearance—a species of vertical vineyard rustling in the storm of conventional opinion. Are they weapons or scalpels? Whetted