boy would often peep on his way home from school, the home of seven
brothers and one sister, all old, toothless, worn--working together
in the daytime at their tiny farm; at night sitting in the gloomy
kitchen, lit by one smoky lamp--all looking straight before them,
saying not a word; or when, at rare intervals, a remark was made,
taking it up each in turn and solemnly repeating it, with perhaps
the slightest variation in form. It was amidst influences such as
these that his boyhood was passed, almost isolated from the world,
brooding over lives of saints and mystics at the same time that he
studied, and delighted in, Shakespeare and the Elizabethans, Goethe
and Heine. For his taste has been catholic always; he admires
Meredith as he admires Dickens, Hello and Pascal no less than
Schopenhauer. And it is this catholicity, this open mind, this eager
search for truth, that have enabled him to emerge from the mysticism
that once enwrapped him to the clearer daylight of actual existence;
it is this faculty of admiring all that is admirable in man and in
life that some day, perhaps, may take him very far.

It will surprise many who picture him as a mere dreamy decadent, to
be told that he is a man of abiding and abundant cheerfulness, who
finds happiness in the simplest of things. The scent of a flower,
the flight of sea-gulls around a cliff, a cornfield in sunshine--
these stir him to strange delight. A deed of bravery, nobility, or
of simple devotion; a mere brotherly act of kindness, the
unconscious sacrifice of the peasant who toils all day to feed and
clothe his children--these awake his warm and instant sympathy. And
with him, too, it is as with De Quincey when he says, "At no time of
my life have I been a person to hold myself polluted by the touch or
approach of any creature that wore a human shape"; and more than one
unhappy outcast, condemned by the stern law of man, has been