Indications towards such a new inspiration are not lacking in Europe and America. They are found in the works of such a writer as Whitman, with his ecstasy at the “ever-returning miracle of the sunrise,” the love of ferries and crowds, cities and men, and all the beauty of the world. A more exotic but still hopeful creed is that of Maeterlinck, with his delight in the white road, and the silence of the night, and the splendour of the sunset; his vision of a humanity whose hearts will grow more gentle with the weather, absorbed in persuading the earth to bring forth ever more marvellous treasures of fruit and flowers. And in England also, in such writings as those of William Morris and Richard Jefferies, there would appear a kind of foretaste of a spirit which in its acceptance and its rejoicing, may be found to build up behind the deserts of life-weariness a triumphant affirmation of the greatness of Present Things. This exultant optimism would often seem to be entirely independent of narrow circumstance or present discouragement. “You never enjoy the world aright,” says Mr. Thomas Treherne, “till you so love the beauty of enjoying it that you are covetous and earnest to persuade others to enjoy it.” Most of those who in latter years of depression and grey skies have revealed themselves as “covetous and earnest to persuade others to enjoy it,” have been great physical sufferers. From a life of physical torment, perhaps intensified and heightened by that torment, they have been engaged in “corroborating for ever the triumph of things.” Stevenson and Henley, Whitman and Jefferies, all those who have “made to-day the first of days and this field Eden,” have learnt the intoxication of present pleasure from association with present pain. “He was a very marked case of hysteria in man,” was one medical verdict upon Jefferies. In the long years of torture which terminated in premature death, “in some way not yet to be explained,” says his latest biographer, “the mortal pining of his body was related to the intense vivacity of his last years.” “Some of my best work,” he wrote, “was done in this intense agony.” In the midst of which agonies he stands as typical of the company of “Life Worshippers” who, awakening while other men were asleep, could behold something of the splendour of the world, the magic of each moment as it passes, vindicating its existence before it dies.