And in everything, though in a somewhat misty fashion, he seemed to feel the personality, the influence, of Harold Brocklehurst. Was it not all――his extraordinarily vivid sense of life――bound up in some subtle way with the beauty of their friendship? Had not their friendship helped him to realise the mystery and loveliness of nature; helped him to make things out; helped to unseal his eyes? It was the force of a temperament that found expression very easily, which he felt to be working now upon his own simpler nature, his spirit, his mind,――altering everything around him, awakening a new beauty in familiar things, suggesting a wider, deeper, more mystical beauty where before he had only been conscious of a material impression. It carried with it, too, a hundred hints, memories, of a strangely familiar paganism, of a fresher, younger world; a hundred touches of poetry:――the sun, the climbing plant: Apollo, Dionysus:――strong, beautiful, swift. This boy!――what had he to do with them? Why should he suggest them? And then, in the background, a haunting sense of something darker, more fateful――tragic even!――again the legend of Dionysus; but more pitiable, quite human, vaguely pathetic and bewildering. By and by he opened a copy of the _Phaedrus_, which he had worked through with his father, and began to read. They had studied together most of the shorter dialogues, and the whole of the _Republic_, but the _Phaedrus_ Graham cared for most. In its pages he had taken his first peep at philosophy――philosophy, as conceived by him, so near to, so replete with, poetry;――‘Really, Phaedrus, you make a most charming guide.’ Nay, it _was_ poetry! deep, impassioned poetry! for with Plato, even the trees and streams, all the lovely things of the visible world, were made to play their parts. It was as if they possessed active and living souls. They had at least, the boy felt, a wonderful share in the development of one’s _own_ soul: they seemed to breathe about it an atmosphere of light and purity and happiness. In Plato’s philosophy――so far as he understood it――there was little he could not accept. On one very hot, still day, for instance, a passing breath of wind on his face had suddenly awakened in him the recollection of a prior existence――faintly, vaguely, perhaps, but still quite clearly enough to stamp a definite impression on his mind.