be the sufferer, the condemned, to make the tragedy complete, and they may be enacted well—­till the sense of God’s Fatherhood came back to me.  So that I can be and feel myself a part of the vast economy, diseased and inefficient though I am—­feel that I am one with the life that throbs in the trees and water, and that forces itself up at every cranny and nestles in every ledge—­can wait patiently for my move, the transference of my vital energy—­as strong as ever, it seems to me, though the engines are weaker—­to some other portion of the frame of things.”

He spoke of spiritualism with great contempt.  “The more I see of spiritualists and the less I see of phenomena,” he said, “the more discontented with it I am.  It is nothing but a fashionable drawing-room game.”

He dwelt a good deal on the subjective interpretation of nature.  One evening—­we had been listening to the owls crying—­he said, abstractedly: 

“We put strange meanings enough, God knows, into faces that never owned them.  We hear dreary hopelessness in the moaning of the wind; wild sorrow in the tossing of the trees; and read into the work-a-day cries of birds, content, humour, melancholy, and a thousand other unknown feelings.”

He spoke much about the country and its effect on people.  “Wisdom,” he said, “is generally reared among fields and woody places, and when she is nearly grown she wanders into the cities of men, to see if she can not rule there; and then the test really comes.  If she is genuine and strong, she says her say and makes her protest, and passes back again, uncontaminated, into the quiet villages, as pure and free as ever.  That is the case with genius.  But if the spring of her energy is not all her own—­is not quite untainted, she parts with her old grace and glory, losing it in hard unloving talk, in selfish intercourse, in striving after the advantages of comfort and wealth.  She stays, and is dissipated—­she is conformed to the image of the world.  That is what happens to mere talent.”

The only other conversation with him that impressed itself very distinctly upon my mind was about religion.  He had been thinking—­so he told me—­very deeply about Christianity, its strength and weakness.  “Its weakness, nowadays,” he said, “is the mistake of confusing it with the principles advocated by any one of the bodies that profess to represent it.  When one sees in the world so many bodies—­backed by wealth, tradition, prestige—­shouting, ’We are the only authorized exponents of Christ’s truth; we are the only genuine succession of the apostles;’ when we see Churches who claim and make much of possessing the succession (which they have in reality forfeited by secession), and yet demand the right to be heretical if the main stream is, as they say, ‘corrupted’ (for once introduce that principle, and you can never limit subdivision, and equitable subdivision too)—­it is no wonder weaker intellects are confused and distressed, and from their inability to decide between five or six sole possessors of the truth, fall outside teaching and encouragement altogether, though they could have got what they wanted in any of these bodies.