girl who had climbed the barrier. Such a smile as she gave her!
And then I caught a quick startled gesture as she slipped from my
vision; I thought afterwards it was that she feared the child might
fall. Mother first, then Queen; even so rest came to her--not in
one of the royal palaces, but in her own home, surrounded by the
immediate circle of her nearest and dearest, while the world kept
watch and ward.

I, a shy lover of the fields and woods, longed always, should a
painless passing be vouchsafed me, to make my bed on the fragrant
pine needles in the aloneness of a great forest; to lie once again
as I had lain many a time, bathed in the bitter sweetness of the
sun-blessed pines, lapped in the manifold silence; my ear attuned
to the wind of Heaven with its call from the Cities of Peace. In
sterner mood, when Love's hand held a scourge, I craved rather the
stress of the moorland with its bleaker mind imperative of
sacrifice. To rest again under the lee of Rippon Tor swept by the
strong peat-smelling breeze; to stare untired at the long cloud-
shadowed reaches, and watch the mist-wraiths huddle and shrink
round the stones of blood; until my sacrifice too was accomplished,
and my soul had fled. A wild waste moor; a vast void sky; and
naught between heaven and earth but man, his sin-glazed eyes
seeking afar the distant light of his own heart.

With years came counsels more profound, and the knowledge that man
was no mere dweller in the woods to follow the footsteps of the
piping god, but an integral part of an organised whole, in which
Pan too has his fulfilment. The wise Venetians knew; and read
pantheism into Christianity when they set these words round
Ezekiel's living creatures in the altar vault of St Mark's:-