A thousand beauties that have never been Haunt me with hope and tempt me to pursue; The gods, methink, dwell just behind the blue; The satyrs at my coming fled the green. The flitting shadows of the grove between The dryads’ eyes were winking, and I knew The wings of sacred Eros as he flew, And left me to the love of things not seen. ’Tis a sad love, like an eternal prayer, And knows no keen delight, no faint surcease, Yet from the seasons hath the earth increase, And heaven shines as if the gods were there. Had Dian passed, there could no deeper peace Embalm the purple stretches of the air. It is no exaggeration to say that were Mr. Santayana in a cloister, or upon a mid-sea island with his books and dreams, he could scarcely be less in touch with the passing world than he is in the midst of the clamor and insistence of modern life, where he keeps the tranquillity of the inner silence as if there were no voices dinning in his ears. He is subjective to the degree of transfusing himself with another’s consciousness, and looking upon his own nature from an impersonal standpoint: There we live o’er, amid angelic powers, Our lives without remorse, as if not ours, And others’ lives with love, as if our own,— says one of the sonnets, imaging the passion-stilled world of reflection. There is a subtlety in Mr. Santayana’s processes of thought that demands intuitive divination on the part of the reader; there is so little objectivity to the idea that its essence may almost escape him. His illustrative symbolism is almost never drawn from nature or the world of men and events, but from the treasure of beauty at the depth of his spirit, where, by some mystic chemistry, he has separated all the elements not in harmony with him. There must at some time have been reaction and repulsion, ferment and explosion, in the laboratory of Mr. Santayana’s mind; but he awaited the subsidence of the action; awaited the period when emotion, thought, and learning had distilled and crystallized before he shaped them forth before the world.