He had published one or two volumes of minor poetry, and his verse, though poor in form, caught all through it the elusive quality of genuine mystical poetry, unearthly, touching the stars, and wakening in the reader the note of yearning for the highest things. I took him with me several times to my little private grove, and he would recite these verses to me in a way that made them sound very different from my own reading of them. And as he lay beside the lake and I heard his reedy voice mingling with the wind in the trees, and watched his watery blue eyes shine across the smoke of our fire, I realized that the value of his poems lay in the fact that they were a perfectly true expression of his self--of his small, mystical, unselfish and oddly elemental soul searching after the God that should finally absorb him up into something greater. I do not wish to criticize him, but only to picture what I saw. His attenuated body, and long thin fingers, his shabby clothes covered with white dust lying by my side under the stars, his eyes looking beyond the world, and the sound of his thin voice that lost half its words somewhere in the wind--the picture is complete in every detail in my mind to this day. His reasoning powers were slight, for like all true mystics he believed in the intuitive perception of truth; but, coming into my life just at this time, he came with influence and a good deal of stimulus too. From the “House of Commons” to his dream-laden atmosphere provided a contrast that brought relief, at any rate.