"Man is the measure of all things," declared an ancient philosopher. And his teaching has not been superseded to-day. The individual is the creator of his own universe; he is the focus of the currents and forces of his world. The meaning of all things is subjective. So the measure of beauty in life for a man is determined by his capacity to receive and understand. Thus it is that a man's joy in experience and his appreciation of art in any of its manifestations are conditioned by the opportunity that nature or art furnishes for his spirit to exercise itself. In the reading of poetry, for example, we seek the expression of ourselves. Our first emotion is, perhaps, a simple, unreflecting delight, the delight which a butterfly must feel among the flowers or that of a child playing in the fields under the warm sun; it is a delight wholly physical,--pure sensation. A quick taking of the breath, the escape of a sigh, inarticulate and uncritical, are the only expression we can find at that instant for what we feel: as when an abrupt turn of the road spreads out before us a landscape of which we had not dreamed, or we enter for the first time the presence of the Apollo Belvedere. We know simply that we are pleased. But after nerves have ceased to tingle so acutely, we begin to think; and we seek to give account to ourselves of the beauty which for the moment we could but feel. Once arrived at the attitude of reflection, we find that the poetry which affects us most and to which we oftenest return is the poetry that contains the record of our own experience, but heightened, the poetry which expresses our desires and aspirations, that in which we recognize ourselves elevated and idealized. In so far as we see in it the ennobled image of our own nature, so far it has power to hold us and to stir us. An elementary manifestation of the tendency to seek in art the record of our own experience is seen in the popularity of those pictures whose subjects are familiar and can be immediately recognized. On a studio wall was once hanging a "Study of Brush," showing the play of sunlight through quivering leaves. A visitor asked the painter why he did not put some chickens in the foreground. To her the canvas was meaningless, for she had never seen, had never really seen, the sunlight dancing on burnished leaves. The chickens, which she had seen and could recognize, were the element of the familiar she required in order to find any significance in the picture.