Such hours were oftenest those in which he had been helped by work of others to the pleasurable apprehension of art, of nature, or of life.

"Not what I do, but what I am, under the power of this vision"-- he would say to himself--"is what were indeed pleasing to the gods!" And yet, with a kind of inconsistency in one who had taken for his philosophic ideal the monochronos hedone+ of Aristippus--the pleasure of the ideal present, of the mystic now--there would come, together with that precipitate sinking of things into the past, a desire, after all, [155] to retain "what was so transitive." Could he but arrest, for others also, certain clauses of experience, as the imaginative memory presented them to himself! In those grand, hot summers, he would have imprisoned the very perfume of the flowers.

To create, to live, perhaps, a little while beyond the allotted hours, if it were but in a fragment of perfect expression:--it was thus his longing defined itself for something to hold by amid the "perpetual flux." With men of his vocation, people were apt to say, words were things.

Well! with him, words should be indeed things,--the word, the phrase, valuable in exact proportion to the transparency with which it conveyed to others the apprehension, the emotion, the mood, so vividly real within himself.

Verbaque provisam rem non invita sequentur:+ Virile apprehension of the true nature of things, of the true nature of one's own impression, first of all!--words would follow that naturally, a true understanding of one's self being ever the first condition of genuine style.