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 it is a Shelleyan union with the most intimate, the most inexpressible things in nature that is revealed in such a note as the following: 'A nameless day, a day without form, yet a day in which the Spring most mysteriously begins to stir. Warm air in the lengthening days; a sudden softening, a weakening of nature.' In describing this atmosphere, this too sudden softness, he uses a word frequent in the vocabulary of Shelley--'fainting.' In truth, like the great English poet, whom he seems not to have known, he seeks from the beauty of things a faculty of self-forgetfulness in lyrical poetry, an inexpressible and blissful passing of the poet's being into the thing he contemplates. What he makes his own in the course of those weeks, what he remembers afterwards, and what he would recall, never to lose it again, is the culminating moment in which he has achieved self-forgetfulness and reached the ineffable. The simplest of natural objects is able to yield him such a moment; see, for instance, this abrupt intuition: 'I had lapsed from my former sense of the benediction of God, when suddenly the beauty--all the beauty--of a certain tree spoke to my inmost heart; and then I understood that an instant of such contemplation is the whole of life.' And still more continuous, still more vibrant, is at times his emotion, as when the bow draws out to the utmost a long ecstatic tone from a sensitive violin. 'What joy is this perpetual thrill in the heart of Nature! That same horizon of which I had watched the awakening, I saw last night bathe itself in rosy light; and then the full moon went up into a tender sky, fretted by coral and saffron trees.' It is very nearly ecstasy with him in that astonishing Christmas night which no one then at the front can ever forget--a solemn