and had no absurd consciousness of external condition and accidental differences to embarrass him. His reverence and his religiousness were profound elements of his nature. He was no formalist. Probably he did not set a very high value upon some of the externals of spiritual life which seem so important to many men. He was, indeed, a loyal supporter of religious works and enterprises, as he was a member of the visible church; and he paid the highest respect to all that pertained to what is commonly demanded as a mark of Christian life and interest. But he had a life in the Spirit which was larger and broader than all that. He felt and he loved the Divine Life in all that he saw, and heard, and studied, and tried to draw and paint, in the world around him. To his thinking it was all the expression of God; as such he reverenced the creation. Through this world of nature he was always seeing and feeling the Father. His letters breathe a note of honest devoutness which passes all lip-service. And scattered through his pages are frequent expressions of a spirituality deeper than any words or phrases which so easily become cant. There is a deep revelation of the heart of the man in a passage in “Woodnotes.” Listen to his soul pouring itself out in these words: “Sitting alone in the woods I have sometimes known a moment of such supreme exaltation that I have almost questioned my sanity--a spirit and an impulse which I would no more attempt to frame into words than I should think to define the Deity himself--‘I am glad to the brink of fear.’ My own identity is a mystery. The presence of the dearest friend on earth would be an unwelcome intrusion. The pulses of the woods beat through me. The joyous flight of bird brings buoyant memories, the linnet’s song now seems swelling in my own throat. Happy Donatello in the garden of the Borghese is no longer a myth, though even he knew no such joy as this. At such times--and are they not vouchsafed to every true ‘Holy-Lander’?--I am conscious of an unwonted sympathy in nature--a strange, double, paradoxical existence, which, while lifting me to the clouds, still holds me to the earth.” It was this inner soul of nature as it filled the inner soul of the man, which he felt a growing power to express in art. But before he could speak his message he passed from our presence. CHAPTER IX AFTERGLOW