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Rh ing and admission of defect is, I imagine, presupposed; but it should not, surely, be reflectively predominant so as to divert attention to itself and impair the simple spirit of trust and surrender. Now this is at the same time the spirit of complete appreciation, which alone can seize the whole fact in its due shape and proportion. This is what in any matter of common life we get, as we say, only from those “who really care.” “Love speaks with better knowledge and knowledge with dearer love.”

The artist, too, we are told, covets “the innocence of the eye”; the gaze for which the whole impression is single, unbroken, and unrationalised.

To illustrate a little further. It is one of the less noted advantages in the succession of fresh lives which death and birth maintain, that the worn and patched and piece-meal experience of the aged scholar or statesman, perhaps