Camera Work: A Photographic Quarterly (1908 (Heft 21))

cosmic mosaic. The utmost we can do is to fit ourselves into our tiny places
as easily as we can3 and if we do not, the loss is our own. For even the
strongest of us are comparatively so trivial that our absence would scarcely
be noticed in the boldness of the design.
Donoghue did not understand how to set himself aright with this world.
He was not versed in human lore, and lacked the gift to gild common
objects with the radiance of his dreams. Have we a right to find fault with
this? No, let us rather admire him for having fought and died so bravely.
A devotion to art like his is too rare in these days to be entirely for-
gotten, and although his art is great rather by what he designed than what he
achieved, he has not worked in vain, and the world-flower of appreciation
that springs after death from the cairns of stone flung at genius during life,
may also bloom for him. g pj

THE DREAM OF BEAUTY.
ND hands grasped for it—eyes sought to behold it—ears strained
to hear—hearts throbbed for its responsive throb. Some died
lacking vigor of body and brain to pursue the dream of their
heart—to snare that which echoed in every vale but eluded
pursuit; that vanished in every pool but defied enmeshing; that faded
with every sunset—but was always beyond the horizon; that glowed forth
from certain eyes—but was lost as behind a veil when one sought to under-
stand; that awakened desire but died at touch of caress or kiss, leaving
but the body.
The thirst of sense, that sight of beauty awakened, some mistook blindly
or wilfully for beauty’s self, and so busying themselves therewith forgot
beauty—in the perversion and inversion of the mere working of the
physiological and psychological machinery of self—and the brain apprecia-
tion thereof—and produced mad things, strong, sinister, revolting; degrading
to self and to art—and went mad. Others, having once tasted the honey of
beauty, forgot the flower thereof in the honey—and thereafter sought the
mere saccharine. Others again, because its shadow was wonderfully luminous,
attempted to depict only melancholy shadows. But some who were large of
brain and pure of heart rested not in their search. To them beauty, ever
elusive, was always near at hand. As harps perfectly attuned speak out of
^the silence of death only at outward touch—so spake their senses, emotions,
understanding, at the touch of perceiving will — awakened to song by
outward signs of the inspiration of Beauty. As are they, so is Beauty, a
manifestation of the Infinite Harmony, such as finite sight may never
perfectly see, but of which inspired imagination may awaken a dream.
Joseph T. Keiley.


26