In the cars sat the women and the men, each one clasping a flower or a fragment of blossom--of hawthorn, apple, or chestnut tree; the little children wriggled and chattered, holding in their arms great bunches of bluebells with their sappy stalks gleaming white where the sun had not stained them; boys with purple-dusty grass bennets and girls with lilac-coloured cuckoo flowers and drooping buttercups. A phantom carillon still chimed from the wild hyacinths, though their towers were fallen and the belfries wrecked. I looked at the transfigured faces of the children--old or young, they were all children--who breathed in the smoke and worked in the shadow, and saw that the beauty of the wild flowers had passed into their eyes; although the woods were ravaged, the spoiling and pillaging had not been in vain. For two or three days wilting flowers and stolen blossom would remind them of the sunlight and the fresh air, of the cloud shadow that swept up and the warmth that followed when the beams of light lacquered the branches of the trees. I was filled with an ecstasy; the car, ordinarily so drab with its burden of artisans and factory workers, seemed illumined and vitalised with yellow, the colour of happiness; a radiance hovered about the children, as though the buttercups had dislustred their gold upon the air. I wanted to shout my joy aloud. Here was a manifestation of my hopes for mankind, the thoughts ever with me; at night when only the stars are in the sky, or when the moon is old and like a scarred shield nailed under the rafters of heaven; at dawn, when the light flows over the eastern bar of the world till it drains into the western sunset. One thought by night and one thought by day--my hope is for the happiness of mankind. Could words of mine but tell you of the dream that lurks by the brook in summer, or with the clouds floating with snowy sails in cerulean waters! There the Immortals are waiting. See the joy and happiness that is with every swallow flying low over a lake, his liquid image gliding under him. What is all the philosophy in the world to the joy of the beautiful swallow? Civilisations have risen and crumbled, faded into nothingness, like footprints in the desert obliterated by sand. The sweet little whispering call of my long-tailed titmice fashioning their bottle nest, so happy in the sunshine, is a wiser and more profound utterance than all the philosophy collected from the books of the world.... The tram drew nearer London with its ragged children; had I doubted it before, no longer was the ideal of the artist obscured from me--you must hear it. It must be the ideal of man to beautify the lives of those who pass nearly all their days in the places whence the wild birds and the flowers have gone for evermore.