IN STORM AND SHINE 49 



nothing but what is tiresome or hideous in certain 

 estates, draw the overplus of tiresomeness and 

 hideousness from their own selves. " Beauty is 

 truth, and truth is beauty," says this philosophy ; 

 " how, then," it queries, " can any condition be 

 unbeautiful ? Is it not yourselves who are in part 

 lacking in a sense of loveliness, since truth can 

 never really be unbeautiful ? " 



Now, whatever we think of this as a species of 

 sophistry, it behoves us to look into it with quiet 

 and decent care. An everyday world, deep in its 

 old conventions, will declare that it is certainly 

 straining a point to try thus to make all geese 

 appear as swans. With the exception of the poet 

 minded to verse the innate grandeur of gloom, the 

 entire sublimity of storm, the entrancing mellow- 

 ness of fog and rain, and the wild joy which comes 

 with a blizzard ; or perhaps of the painter minded 

 to achieve in paint what the poet is doing in ink 

 (both of them, most probably, contriving their 

 rhapsodies within the snug seclusion of their rooms) 

 — with the exception of these two privileged 

 persons comfortably absorbed in justifying a bias, 

 an everyday world, voting bad weather a kill-joy 

 and mar-plot, will find happiness only in avoiding 

 and forgetting it. 



