‘_I_ know, for instance,’ he went on, the strange flush of enthusiasm rising into his eyes, ‘that the pine trees hold wind in their arms as cups hold rare wine, and that when it spills I hear the exquisite trickling of its music—but I can’t tell any one _that_! And I can’t even put the wild magic of it into verse or music. Or even into conduct,’ he concluded with a laugh, ‘conduct that’s sane, that is. For, if I could, I should find what I’m for ever seeking behind all life and behind all expressions of beauty—I should find the Reality I seek!’ ‘I’ve no safety-valves,’ he added, swinging the glasses round by their strap to the imminent danger of various articles of furniture, ‘that’s the long and short of it. Like a giraffe that can’t make any sound at all although it has the longest throat in all creation. Everything in me accumulates and accumulates. If only’—and the strange light came back for a second to his brown eyes—‘I could write, or sing, or pray—live as the saints did, or do something to—to express adequately the sense of beauty and wonder and delight that lives, like the presence of a God, in my soul!’ The lamp in his eyes faded slowly and he sat back on the little cabin sofa, screwing and unscrewing his glasses till it was surprising that the thread didn’t wear out. And as he screwed, a hundred fugitive pictures passed thronging through his mind; moments of yearning and of pain, of sudden happiness and of equally sudden despondency, vivid moods of all kinds provoked by the smallest imaginable fancies, as the way ever was with him. For the moods of the sky were his moods; the swift, coloured changes of sea and cloud were mirrored in his heart as with all too impressionable people, and he was for ever trying to seize the secret of their loveliness and to give it form—in vain. Like many another mystical soul he saw the invisible foundations of the visible world—longed to communicate it to others—found he couldn’t—then suffered all the pain and fever of repression that seeks in vain for adequate utterance. Too shy to stammer his profound yearnings to ears that would not hear, and, never having known the blessed relief of a sympathetic audience, he perforce remained choked and dumb, the only mitigation he knew being that loss of self which follows prolonged contemplation. In his contemplation of Nature, for instance, he would gaze upon the landscape, the sky, a tree or flower, until their essential beauty passed into his own nature. For the moment he _felt with_ these things. He _was_ them. He took their qualities literally into himself. He lost his ordinary personality by changing its centre, merging it into those remoter phases of consciousness which extended from himself mysteriously to include the landscape, the sky, the tree, the flower. For him everywhere in Nature there was psychic energy. And it was difficult to say which was with him the master passion: to find Reality—God—through Nature, or to explain Nature through God.