Excerpt from Not Wisely, but Too Well; A Novel, Vol. 1 of 2: By the Author of Cometh Up as a Flower A thing of beauty is a joy for ever. That is my text for this chapter, and my service is going to be an amplification and enlarging upon that idea. Keats meant it in a purely material sense, for his intense perception of the beautiful was confined to material objects; but I, having adopted it for my motto, intend it to be taken in a nobler, wider, more spiritual sense. The subject I am going to write about is to my mind a thing of beauty; for what is more preeminently so than a tender, loving, passionate, human soul, made more tender, more loving, by many a sore grief, by many a gnawing sorrow, till towards the hour of its setting, whether calm or whelmed to the last in storm-clouds, it shines with a chaste mellow radiance such as our earth lamps do not afford us here, borrowed (oh, priceless loan!) from the fountains of light above? Love in such a soul, growing purified from the drossy, worthless part of earthly passion which often times forms the largest share of it, is raised higher.

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