"Alert, I seek exactitude of rule, I step and square my shoulders with the squad, But there are blaeberries on old Barrule, And Langness has its heather still--thank God!" --With the rest of the rebellious stanzas. We may go farther and allow that he played with the mood until he sometimes forgot on which side lay seriousness and on which side humour. Still it _was_ a mood; and it was Brown, after all, who wrote 'Planting':-- "Who would be planted chooseth not the soil Or here or there, Or loam or peat, Wherein he best may grow And bring forth guerdon of the planter's toil-- The lily is most fair, But says not' I will only blow Upon a southern land'; the cedar makes no coil What rock shall owe The springs that wash his feet; The crocus cannot arbitrate the foil That for his purple radiance is most meet-- Lord, even so I ask one prayer, The which if it be granted, It skills not where Thou plantest me, only I would be planted." "You don't care for school-work," he writes to an Old Cliftonian. . . . "I demur to your statement that when you take up schoolmastering your leisure for this kind of thing will be practically gone. Not at all. If you have the root of the matter in you the school-work will insist upon this kind of thing as a relief. My plan always was to recognise two lives as necessary--the one the outer Kapelistic life of drudgery, the other the inner and cherished life of the spirit. It is true that the one has a tendency to kill the other, but it must not, and you must see that it does not. . . . The pedagogic is needful for bread and butter, also for a certain form of joy; of the inner life you know what I think." These are wise words, and I believe they represent Brown more truly than utterances which only seem more genuine because less deliberate. He was as a house master excellent, with an excellence not achievable by men whose hearts are removed from their work: he awoke and enjoyed fervent friendships and the enthusiastic admiration of many youngsters; he must have known of these enthusiasms, and was not the man to condemn them; he had the abiding assurance of assisting in a kind of success which he certainly respected. He longed for the day of emancipation, to return to his Island; he was impatient; but I must decline to believe he was unhappy.