... A victory for the will this morning. ... Tomorrow is the first of August, and I shall enter upon my forty days. The ringing in my ears is the ringing of my fleshly stars "toned all in Time." I have commenced an anthology of high imaginings more worthy than a book of essays of that title I have loved and desired to use for years,--_Flame and Dew_. If rightly done, it may do poetry one of the greatest of services by assisting it to praise Beauty on many lips in naked Light. I wish to consecrate my work on it to that end. Today I have been influenced by Frederick Tennyson, Traherne, and Patmore. In agony lies the highest music. The key is struck by circumstance, Time's organist, and the stars tremble with music. For the full thundering silence of Absolute Beauty a Divine Agony was necessary, so that all Heaven and its choirs and Hell trembled in the majesty of this _stricken_ Doom. Death is the final chord, the passage of our full song from time to the silence of eternity. Sleep next to death is the most terrible life that soul and body knows. It is the center of the wheel radiating high powers to the circumference. The speed there is terrific, so fast that it hardens, again that "majestic instancy." The tiniest flame is the friction of conflicting "universes." Beauty is alike the center and circumference of infinity, the silent wheel of omnipresent omnipotence, wherein all thoughts are not timed but eternal. From eternity we were nothing: to eternity we are Beauty's image. Is it strange that in sleep we are often given sight? August 1. Art is the exhibition of life in the light of eternity. I can conceive of no other adequate critical formula. This applies to painting, sculpture, literature and music. Such too is the art of life,--the exhibition to God and man of life in the light of eternity. I have been startled to find a kinship between Wordsworth and Millet. I found it today in a stooped old man who was traveling the roads with a walking stick and a heavy bundle of driftwood. He was worthy of a great painter or a great poet. By the sign of the cross one draws a magic circle round the soul which evil may not penetrate. It places one "in the name." On the seashore one should lie parallel with the waves facing inland. Then only may one advance onward with their prayer. August 2.