But here, in battle, face to face with the eternities, that spirit of his sounds like the chord of an instrument heard for the first time in its originality and its infinite sensibility.  Nor are these random notes; they soon make one harmonious sound and acquire a most touching significance, until by daily practice he learns how to abstract himself altogether from the most wretched surroundings.  A quite impersonal ego seems then to detach itself from the particular ego that suffers and is in peril; it looks impartially upon all things, and sees its other self as a passing wave in the tide that a mysterious Intelligence controls.  Strange faculty of double existence and of vision!  He possesses it in the midst of the very battle in which his active valour gained him the congratulations of his commanding officer.  In the furnace in which his flesh may be consumed he looks about him, and next morning he writes, ‘Well, it was interesting.’  And he adds, ’what I had kept about me of my own individuality was a certain visual perceptiveness that caused me to register the setting of things—­a setting that dramatised itself as artistically as in any stage-management.  During all these minutes I never relaxed in my resolve to see how it was.’  He then, too, became aware of the meaning of violence.  His tender and meditative nature had always held it in horror.  And, perhaps for that very reason, he sought its explanation.  It is by violence that an imperfect and provisional state of things is shattered, and what was lax is put into action again.  Life is resumed, and a better order becomes possible.  Here again we find his acceptance, his submission to the Reason that directs the universe; confidence in what takes place—­that is his conclusion.

Such times for him are times of observation properly so called, of purer thought in which the impulses of the painter and the poet have no share.  That kind of observation is not infrequent with him, when he is dealing with the world and with human action.  It awakes at a war-spectacle, at a trait of manners, at the reading of a book, at a recollection of history or art; it is often to the Bible that he turns, and, amid the worst clamours, to the beautiful plastic images of Greece.  Admirable is such serene energy of a spirit able to live purely as a spirit.  It is admirable, but it is not unique; great intellectual activity is not uncommon with the French; others of our soldiers are philosophers among the shells.  What does set these letters in a place apart is something more profound and more organic than thought, and that is sentiment; sentiment in its infinite and indefinite degrees, its relation to the aspects of nature—­in a word, that poetic faculty which is akin to the musical, proceeding as they both do from the primitive ground-work of our being, and uniting in the inflexions of rhythm and of song.  I have already named Shelley in connexion with the poet we are considering.  And