“But that cannot be beautiful.”
“No and yes. I fished above there one year, and for some days I found the desolation most oppressive. Then, one evening, I saw something in these gray dead trees, and ever since I have seen in them more and more that is strange or even beautiful.”
“I think I have felt like that at times,—as if of a sudden I had become another person, and saw with strange eyes. Once we were looking at Ruysdael’s pictures; it was at Amsterdam, and Aunt Anne said how delightful it would be just in a moment to see the world of things as a great master does, or the world of men as a poet may.”
“What spirit made me his own I do not know, my dear,” said Lyndsay; “but, if he fled, he left me some permanent property. There is a bit of St. Clair’s verse which puts it fairly.”
“And it is—Pardy?”
“I think I can repeat it, but I am never sure about my quotations:
‘If from the vantage of thy wiser heart
I could look out on nature through thine eyes,
I think that I should learn a novel art,
And joyful capture some divine surprise.