The Cruise of the Branwen

CRUISE OF THE BRANWEN because it is not the pathetic fragment of what was once the tenderness and grace of woman, or the resource and strength of man, or the complicated emotion of a group of human :figures, or the self-sufficient majesty of serene divinities. It is a building only, erected for man's purposes after patterns man alone has made. Nor does its charm essentially depend either upon the natural surroundings which add so much to the sympathy and pleasure of the visitor who travels to that storied shrine, or upon those gifts of mellowing time which make the shadows in its fluted pillars deepen into sunset gold instead of the more frigid blues and greys that fringe the bosoming snow on mountain pastures. There is in it something of the "stuff incorporeal that baulks the grave," something of that essence, impalpable, intangible, which informs all living things. Who shall say, in these days when science is knocking so close upon the doors of Life and Death, that inorganic Matter as we have under– stood it hitherto is in its highest forms incapable of receiving some impress of what we still must call organic energies ? At the last's last we are as incapable of defining one as we are unable to describe the other. The only thing about our own personality of the existence of which we can speak with greater certainty than of anything else connected with our being is our will, our power of choice, "the satisfaction," as it has been called, "of a passion in us of which we can give no rational explanation whatever." This is the 140