"My daylight," he wrote in 1853, "is sombered by a natural instinct of unearthliness, a looking backwards and forwards for that sunny land which Imagination robes in unfailing Summer where no tears dim the Light, and no graves lie underneath our feet, by the side of which Riches, honors, even Health the first of blessings, all, in short, that is commonly called Happiness, looks cold and imperfect--while the great Shadow of Death fills up the distance, and the steps to it lie over withered garlands and dry bones." And again: "For an illustration of the bliss and delight of that higher state of being which under the influence of that Spirit-Sun shall hereafter rise daily to its appointed task, whatever that may be, with full heart and mind--I go back to 'the days that are no more,' when I used to dive into the sunny morn, rejoicing in my strength, refreshed with dreamless sleep 'like a giant with wine,' carrying my whole soul with me without fears or regrets, with a joy focussed like sunlight through a lens, on the infinite present moment! Such memories, tho' mournful, are blessed if they bring with them analogies of the 'Higher State to Be.' For the angel is but the infant sublimated--the rapture and the innocence, with the Wisdom and the Power adjoined, and crowned with Immortality! That is to say his will being in all things conformable to the Divine--he receives the divine influences which are heaven! And surely my unshakable belief is that all created beings--even those who have chosen the lowest Hell--will be eventually redeemed, exalted, and glorified--or there would be an Infinite Power of Good unable or unwilling to subdue Finite Evil." His mind, however, was too independent to accept any of the creeds of orthodoxy. He is perpetually thundering against the "frowzy diatribes of black men with white ties--too often the only white thing about them" (one can hear him rap out the parenthesis), and the "little papacies" that dominate a country town or village. Rome he regarded with an excessive hatred, and Oxford and Cambridge, twin homes of orthodoxy, did not escape his wrath. Indeed, he regarded most modern Christianity as a perversion of the original truth, and Atheism in all its guises he hated with an even greater bitterness, as the following letter shows: