By far the strongest influence in my life, however, was Nature; it betrayed itself early, growing in intensity with every year. Bringing comfort, companionship, inspiration, joy, the spell of Nature has remained dominant, a truly magical spell. Always immense and potent, the years have strengthened it. The early feeling that everything was alive, a dim sense that some kind of consciousness struggled through every form, even that a sort of inarticulate communication with this “other life” was possible, could I but discover the way--these moods coloured its opening wonder. Nature, at any rate, produced effects in me that only something living could produce; though not till I read Fechner’s “Zend-Avesta,” and, later still, James’s “Pluralistic Universe,” and Dr. R. M. Bucke’s “Cosmic Consciousness” did a possible meaning come to shape my emotional disorder. Fairy tales, in the meanwhile bored me. Real facts were what I sought. That these existed, that I had once known them but had now forgotten them, was thus an early imaginative conviction. * * * * * This tendency showed itself even in childhood. We had left the Manor House, Crayford, and now lived in a delightful house at Shortlands, in those days semi-country. It was the time of my horrible private schools--I went to four or five--but the holidays afforded opportunities.... I was a dreamy boy, frequently in tears about nothing except a vague horror of the practical world, full of wild fancies and imagination and a great believer in ghosts, communings with spirits and dealings with charms and amulets, which latter I invented and consecrated myself by the dozen. This was long before I had read a single book. I loved to climb out of the windows at night with a ladder, and creep among the shadows of the kitchen garden, past the rose trees and under the fruit-tree wall, and so on to the pond where I could launch the boat and practise my incantations in the very middle among the floating weeds that covered the surface in great yellow-green patches. Trees grew closely round the banks, and even on clear nights the stars could hardly pierce through, and all sorts of beings watched me silently from the shore, crowding among the tree stems, and whispering to themselves about what I was doing. I cannot say I ever believed actually that my spells would produce any results, but it pleased and thrilled me to think that they might do so; that the scum of weeds might slowly part to show the face of a water-nixie, or that the forms hovering on the banks might flit across to me and let me see their outline against the stars. Everything I did and felt in this way was evolved out of my inner consciousness, and even after I had passed into long trousers I loved the night, the shadows, empty rooms and haunted woods.