In the furnace in which his flesh may be consumed he looks about him,
and next morning he writes, 'Well, it was interesting.' And he adds,
'what I had kept about me of my own individuality was a certain visual
perceptiveness that caused me to register the setting of things--a
setting that dramatised itself as artistically as in any
stage-management. During all these minutes I never relaxed in my resolve
to see _how it was_.' He then, too, became aware of the meaning of
violence. His tender and meditative nature had always held it in horror.
And, perhaps for that very reason, he sought its explanation. It is by
violence that an imperfect and provisional state of things is shattered,
and what was lax is put into action again. Life is resumed, and a better
order becomes possible. Here again we find his acceptance, his
submission to the Reason that directs the universe; confidence in what
_takes place_--that is his conclusion.

Such times for him are times of observation properly so called, of purer
thought in which the impulses of the painter and the poet have no share.
That kind of observation is not infrequent with him, when he is dealing
with the world and with human action. It awakes at a war-spectacle, at a
trait of manners, at the reading of a book, at a recollection of history
or art; it is often to the Bible that he turns, and, amid the worst
clamours, to the beautiful plastic images of Greece. Admirable is such
serene energy of a spirit able to live purely as a spirit. It is
admirable, but it is not unique; great intellectual activity is not
uncommon with the French; others of our soldiers are philosophers among
the shells. What does set these letters in a place apart is something
more profound and more organic than thought, and that is sentiment;
sentiment in its infinite and indefinite degrees, its relation to the
aspects of nature--in a word, that poetic faculty which is akin to the
musical, proceeding as they both do from the primitive ground-work of