“I began to moralize aloud.  I said, ’Yes, and this is the way in which lives pass:  a little laughter and a few jests and a song or two; forgetful, all the time, that the lights must be extinguished and the wine spilled, and that night laps them round,’—­catching, as I said this, a glimpse of the dark trees swaying outside.

“But the man in the cloak took me up.  ‘This shows,’ he said, ’how superficial your view is—­how little you look below the surface of things.  This laughter and light talk are but the signs and symbols of qualities of which your bitter character knows nothing—­goodfellowship, kindliness, brave hopefulness, and many things beside.’

“Then he turned to me impressively, and said, ’What you want is deepening.’

“I woke with the word ringing in my ears.”

Besides this, there was a curious little peculiarity in him that I have never heard of in anyone else:  a capacity for seeing little waking visions with strange distinctness.

His description of this is as follows: 

“I have the power, or rather something in me is able (for I can not resist it), of suddenly producing a picture on the retina, of such vividness as to blot out everything around me.  I have it generally when I am a little tired with exercise or brain-work or people:  it is prefaced by seeing a bright blue spot, which moves, or rather rushes, across my field of vision, and is immediately succeeded by the picture.

“A crumbling sandstone temple, among fields of blue flowers—­an obelisk carved with figures, in a wood—­a gray indistinct marsh, with mist rising from it, and by the edge a white bird, egret or something similar, of dazzling whiteness—­a green lane, with cows in it.  I could go on for ever enumerating them.  They pass in a fraction of a second, three or four succeeding one another.  My eyes are not shut, nor do I look different.  I have always seen them.  I was alarmed about them once, and went to a doctor; but he said he could not explain it—­it was probably a nervous idiosyncrasy:  and I felt all the better for my habit having a name.”

One more thing I must mention about him, which I have discovered since his death.  I must add that I never had the least suspicion of it in his life.

He was the victim during this time of a depression of mind; not constant, but from which he never felt secure.  I subjoin a few entries from his diaries.

“Very troubled and gloomy:  a strange heart-sinking—­a blank misgiving without any adequate cause upon me all day.  One can not help feeling during such times—­and, alas! they are becoming very familiar to me—­that some mysterious warfare may be being fought out somewhere over one’s only half-conscious soul:  that some strange decision may be pending.”  And again:  “For the last week, my mind—­though I have reiterated again and again to myself that it is purely physical—­has steadily refused to take any view of life, to have any outlook, except the most dismal.  I am a little better to-day—­well enough to see the humour of it, though God knows it is black enough while it lasts.”