This result was due to no fault—no neglect, that is—of his own, but to circumstances and temperament combined. It explains, however, why, after twenty years in the backwoods of America, he saw the coast of the Old Country with a deep emotion that was not all delight, but held something also of dismay. Left an orphan, with his younger sister, at an early age, the blundering of trustees had forced him out into the world before his first term at Cambridge was over, and after various vicissitudes he had found his way to America and had been drawn into the lumber trade. Here his knowledge and love of trees—it was a veritable passion with him—soon resulted in a transfer from the Minneapolis office to the woods, and after an interesting apprenticeship, he came to hold an important post in which he was strangely at home. He was appointed to the post of ‘Wood Cruiser’—forest-traveller, _commis voyageur_ of the primeval woods. His duties, well paid too, were to survey, judge, mark, and report upon the qualities and values of the immense timber limits owned by his Company. And he loved the work. It was a life of solitude, but a life close to Nature; borne in his canoe down swift wilderness streams; meeting the wild animals in their secret haunts; becoming intimate with dawns and sunsets, great winds, the magic of storms and stars, and being initiated into the profound mysteries of the clean and haunted regions of the world. And the effect of this kind of life upon him—especially at an age when most men are busy learning more common values in the strife of cities—was of course significant. For here, in this solitary existence, the beauty of the world, virgin and glorious, struck the eyes of his soul and nearly blinded them. His whole being threw itself inwards upon his thoughts, and outwards upon what fed his thoughts—the wonder of Nature. Even as a boy he had been mystically minded, a poet if ever there was one, though a poet without a lyre; but at school he had chanced to come under the influence of masters who had sought to curb the exuberance of his imagination, so that he started into life with the rooted idea that it was something of a disgrace for a man to be too sensitive to beauty, and to possess a vivid and coloured imagination was almost a thing to be ashamed of. This view of his only ‘silver talent,’ moreover, was never permitted by the nature of his life to alter. His early American experiences stiffened it into a conviction which he yet despised. The fires ran hidden, if unchecked. Had he dwelt in cities, they might have suffered total extinction perhaps, but here, in the heart of the free woods, they speedily rose to the surface again and flamed. He grew up singularly unspoilt, the shyness of the original nature utterly uncorrected, the stores of a poetic imagination accumulating steadily, but always unuttered.