has set out to find God, he must find him or die. This was the
inside reality whose outcome set the public of Glaston babbling. It
was from this that George Bascombe magisterially pronounced him a
hypochondriac, worrying his brain about things that had no
existence--as George himself could with confidence testify, not once
having seen the sight of them, heard the sound of them, or imagined
in his heart that they ought to be, or even that they might possibly
be. He pronounced indeed their existence inconsistent with his own.
The thought had never rippled the grey mass of his self-satisfied
brain that perhaps there was more of himself than what he counted he
himself yet knew, and that possibly these matters had a consistent
relation with parts unknown. Poor, poverty-stricken Wingfold!
--actually craving for things beneath Bascombe's notice! actually
crying for something higher and brighter than the moon! How
independent was George compared with Thomas!--content to live what
he called his life, be a benefactor to men, chiefly in ridding their
fancies of the goblins of aspiration, then die his death, and have
done with the business; while poor misguided, weak-brained,
hypochondriacal Thomas could be contented with nothing less than the
fulfilment of the promise of a certain man who perhaps never
existed: "The Father and I will come to him and make our abode with
him."

Yet Thomas too had his weakness for the testimony of the senses. If
he did not, like George, refuse to believe without it, he yet could
not help desiring signs and wonders that he might believe. Of this
the following poem was a result, and I give it the more willingly
because it will show how the intellectual nature of the man had
advanced, borne on the waves that burst from the fountains of the
great deep below it.