Art education, so called, which is the training of the eye and the hand, gives one a facility for recording facts: _truth_ never. Truth is _felt_. To the painter, the poet, the romanticist facts are cold things belonging to the past--dead things that have nothing to do with intuition, _vision_, _truth_. He must dream new dreams, employ new methods, create new things! He is not a common creature and, therefore, should not be entrusted with any public responsibility: but God grant that in all the economic medley, called civilization, he may have the right to live. 5. The Gift of Silence Although I write just the things I feel, my book is an effort: but I am glad of this. That I have no liking for any literary task and hate all correspondence I regard as a gift. My mother has a rarer gift: she does not talk. She speaks when she has something to say and never utters empty words. O but she is eloquent! She clothes her thoughts with simple language and stops at the right moment; it is a well-timed pause in which her face counts. Her intermittent silence is a master stroke; it gives the same sense of space that I would have in my picture. Perhaps it is beyond art, but it is all hers without an effort; arising out of her good soul it belongs to her nature. I see her too little; her home is in a village on the coast and mine in an inland city. That I shall miss her one day is the miserable thought I cannot get rid of without seeing her. O but when I arrive my fears vanish in a moment, for she lives for me. She is dear to look upon: but when she looks at me my sense of spiritual security is greater than can ever be described. I feel the influence of her peace which brings mine back to me. Her eyes are aglow from silent thoughts of me, and I stay with no other desire than to be with her and believe in immortality--believe all her belief! 6. The Magic of Words There is something in the art of the master that I can never find a word for. I believe it is a sin to seek for one. Art in the finer sense is beyond the limitations of all words assigned by the philologists. The master is a magician, therefore it is only the poets that can speak with authority about his work: and it requires all the magic of poetry to deal with the creation of things. Words must be arranged so as to lose all their etymological stiffness before they can ever express the things born of inspiration. Only inasmuch as the poet’s song transcends the meaning of his words does he approach the spiritual sense of art. 7. The Personal Note