Yet the emotional intensity concealed beneath this equable habit of soul, is evident from the first line to the last. In the fine phrase of the Friends after his death, Woolman "underwent many deep baptisms;" how deep, the _Journal_ reveals. He was a man of impassioned tenderness. Even as a child he saw "that as the mind is moved by an inward principle to love God as an invisible, incomprehensible Being, so by the same principle it is moved to love Him in all his manifestations in the visible world. That as by his breath the flame of life has kindled in all sensible creatures, to say that we love God as unseen and at the same time exercise cruelty toward the least creature moving by his life, or by life derived from Him, is a contradiction in itself." Woolman did not only say these things, he felt them. He is among the great lovers of the world. His tenderness for animals was always keen, from the days in which, as he has told us, he suffered childish remorse from having killed a robin, to his last voyage, when in the midst of personal suffering, he noted pityingly the dull and pining appearance of the "dunghill fowls" on board. "I believe," he writes, "where the love of God is verily perfected, a care will be felt that we do not lessen that sweetness of life in the animal creation which the great Creator intends for them under our government." He who so sympathised with the robin and the cock was filled with a yearning compassion for the sorrows of humanity. Of him as of Shelley it might well be said, "He was as a nerve o'er which do creep the else unfelt oppressions of the earth." We read of his appetite failing through the agitation of his mind over human pain and his relations to it. In his last illness he broke forth in words that might have been uttered by S. Catherine of Siena: "O Lord my God! The amazing horrors of darkness were gathered around me and covered me all over, and I saw no way to go forth. I felt the misery of my fellow-beings separated from the divine harmony, and it was heavier than I could bear; I was crushed down under it." All great lovers are great sufferers: Woolman was no exception to the rule.