Joyous Gard by A.C. Benson

There is one difficulty which stands at the threshold of dealing with the sense of beauty so as to give it due importance and preponderance, and that is that it seems with many people to be so frail a thing, and to visit the mind only as the last grace of a mood of perfect serenity and well-being. Many people, and those not the least thoughtful and intelligent, find by experience that it is almost the first thing to disappear in moments of stress and pressure. Physical pain, grief, pre-occupation, business, anxiety, all seem to have the power of quenching it instantaneously, until one is apt to feel that it is a thing of infinite delicacy and tenderness, and can only co-exist with a tranquillity which it is hard in life to secure. The result of this no doubt is that many active-minded and forcible people are ready to think little of it, and just regard it as a mood that may accompany a well-earned holiday, and even so to be sparingly indulged.

It is also undoubtedly true that in many robust and energetic people the sense of what is beautiful is so far atrophied that it can only be aroused by scenes and places of almost melodramatic picturesqueness, by ancient buildings clustered on craggy eminences, great valleys with the frozen horns of mountains, wind-ravaged and snow-streaked, peering over forest edges, the thunder and splendour of great sea-breakers plunging landward under rugged headlands and cliff-fronts. But all this pursuit of sensational beauty is to mistake its quality; the moment it is thus pursued it ceases to be the milk and honey of life, and it becomes a kind of stimulant which excites rather than tranquillises.