And again, what gleaming single phrases, whole counsels of existence in a dozen words! He must copy out some of them for Esther. This, for example: "_Not pleasure, but fulness, completeness of life generally_," or this: "_To be able to make use of the flower when the fruit, perhaps, was useless or poisonous_" or again this: "_To be absolutely virgin towards a direct and concrete experience_"--and there were a hundred more. Then for the young craftsman what an insight into, what a compassionate, childish remembrance of the moods and the little foolish accidents of creation: "_His dilettanteism, his assiduous preoccupation with what might seem but the details of mere form or manner, was, after all, bent upon the function of bringing to the surface, sincerely and in their integrity, certain strong personal intuitions, certain visions or apprehensions of things as being, with important results, in this way rather than that--apprehensions which the artistic or literary expression was called upon to follow, with the exactness of wax or clay, clothing the model within it. Flavian, too, with his fine, clear mastery of the practically effective, had early laid hold of the principle, as axiomatic in literature: That 'to know when one's self is interested, is the first condition of interesting other people'"_ And once more: "_As it oftenest happens also, with natures of genuinely poetic quality, those piecemeal beginnings came suddenly to harmonious completeness among the fortunate incidents, the physical heat and light, of one singularly happy day_." And, over all, what a beauty! a beauty at once so sensuous and so spiritual--the beauty of flowering laurel, the beauty of austerity aflower. Here the very senses prayed. Surely this was the most beautiful prose book ever written! It had been compared, he saw, with Gautier's "Mademoiselle de Maupin;" but was not the beauty of that masterpiece, in comparison with the beauty of this, as the beauty of a leopard-skin to the beauty of a statue of Minerva, withdrawn in a grove of ilex.