me.  I suppose that other men have the same sense of sacredness and mystery about love and friendship.  They are deep and beautiful things for me, but they are things seen by the way, and not waiting for me at the end of my pilgrimage.  Music holds within it the same sort of hidden influence as the beauty of nature.  It is not so with pictorial art, or even with writing, because the personality, the imperfections, of the artist come in between me and the thought.  One cannot make the pigments and the words say what one means.  Even in music, the art sometimes comes between one and the thing signified But the plain, sweet, strong chords themselves bring the fulness of joy, just as these broken lights and ragged veils of cloud do.  I remember once going to dine at the house of a great musician; I was a minute or two before the time, and I found him sitting in his room at a grand piano, playing the last cadence of some simple piece, unknown to me.  He made no sign of recognition; he just finished the strain; a lesser man would have put the sense of hospitality first, and would have leapt up in the midst of an unfinished chord.  But not till the last echo of the last chord died away did he rise to receive me.  I felt that he was thus obeying a finer and truer instinct than if he had made haste to end.

Everyone must find out for himself what are the holiest and most permanent things in life, and worship them sincerely and steadfastly, allowing no conventionality, no sense of social duty, to come in between him and his pure apprehension.  Thus, and thus only, can a man tread the path among the stars.  Thus it is, I think, that religious persons, like artists, arrive at a certain detachment from human affections and human aims, which is surprising and even distressing to men whose hearts are more knit to the things of earth.  Those who see in the dearest and most intimate of human relations, the purest and highest gift of God, will watch with a species of terror, and even repulsion, the aloofness, the solitariness of the mystic and the artist.  It will seem to them a sort of chilly isolation, an inhuman, even a selfish thing; just as the mystic and the artist will see in the normal life of men a thing fettered and bound with sad and small chains.  It is impossible to say which is the higher life—­no dogmatism is possible—­all depends upon the quality of the emotion; it is the intensity of the feeling rather than its nature that matters.  The impassioned lover of human relations is a finer being than the unimpassioned artist, just as the impassioned artist is a finer being than the man who loves sensually and materialistically.  All depends upon whether the love, whatever it be—­the love of nature or of art, of things spiritual or divine, the love of humanity, the sense of brotherly companionship—­leads on to something unfulfilled and high, or whether it is satisfied.  If our desire is satisfied, we fail; if it is for ever unsatisfied, we are on the right