A FOOTNOTE OF NATURE
In poetry, however, this treble phase is often inadequately expressed. Only a trained ear can make out its music, can catch the rhythmic beauty of its harmonies; and only a trained eye can appreciate the word-painting. For most people, especially in this age of free verse and realism, read in poetry only the idea it conveys, the sentiment it shrines or burlesques, or the bare facts it gathers and disseminates. But in music is the temple of the trinity of Art for those who can see as well as hear; in painting too, for those who can read as well as see.
Indeed, the three arts are as associated with each other, as related to each other as the tripple phenomenon of a mountain stream. For in its cascade-bedecked currents, breaking into silver spray, singing themselves into cerulean ecstasies, pausing in hollows under daffiodiled banks, flowing in transparent lucid stanzas over the moss-carpeted rocks, we have the sonata, the poem and the picture combined.
And never, as I said, could I fathom the
[69]