Page:Path of Vision; pocket essays of East and West.djvu/70

 that rises above it, invokes the divine in it, is the work of genius. And this can only be done through the magnifying and intensifying process. Even the eye of the soul can not always see the subtleties that conceal a world of beauty and charm. So the medium of genius, which stands between us and Nature, is necessarily complex, and is endowed moreover with an intense passion. Every note and echo, every line and shade, no matter how minute and distant, is transfigured through it, is intensified, magnified for our common perception.

Passing through a glade, I hear the flitting notes of a bird or smell the elusive aroma concealed in the brush. The poet sits there and, with infinite patience, waits and waits, till he catches the one and identifies the other. The result would be a lyric perhaps, in which both are so intensely reproduced that they are unmistakable. Inversely, and by the same token, there is good reason for magnifying certain situations in literature, on a canvas, or on the