This was a great turn in her career, wonderful in its tragic possibilities, and something like falling in love; for her new art brought her a new pleasure and a new unrest, purer and more continual than those drowsy and terrible ones which she knew before. Reflected light is beautiful. The direct downpour of light through space leaves space wonderfully dark, and it falls on the earth indiscriminately upon the wise and the foolish, to warm or to scorch them; but the few rays caught by solid matter or drifting vapour become prismatic, soft, and infinitely varied; not only reporting truly the position and material diversity of things, but adding to them an orchestration in design and colour bewitching to the senses. It was not the stars but the terrestrial atmosphere that the eyes of the flesh were made to see; even mother Psyche can love the light, when it clothes or betrays something else that matters; and the fleshly-spiritual Goethe said most truly: _Am farbigen Abglanz haben wir das Leben_. 5 AVERSION FROM PLATONISM Repetition is the only form of permanence that nature can achieve, and in those Mediterranean regions that nurtured the classic mind, by continually repeating the same definite scenes, nature forced it to fix its ideas. Every one learned to think that the earth and the gods were more permanent than himself; he perused them, he returned to them, he studied them at arm's length, and he recognized their external divinity. But where the Atlantic mists envelop everything, though we must repeatedly use the same names for new-born things, as we continue to christen children John and Mary, yet we feel that the facts, like the persons, are never really alike; everything is so fused, merged, and continuous, that whatever element we may choose to say is repeated seems but a mental abstraction and a creature of language. The weather has got into our bones; there is a fog in the brain; the limits of our own being become uncertain to us. Yet what is the harm, if only we move and change inwardly in harmony with the ambient flux? Why this mania for naming and measuring and mastering what is carrying us so merrily along? Why shouldn't the intellect be vague while the heart is comfortable? 6 CLOUD CASTLES