roup of infirm or
unlucky persons, whom he explained to themselves and to others, turning
cat to griffin, goose to swan. In later years he was to accept the
position of organizer of a co-operative banking system, before he had even
read a book upon economics or finance, and within a few months to give
evidence before a Royal Commission upon the system, as an acknowledged
expert, though he had brought to it nothing but his impassioned
versatility.

At the time I write of him, he was the religious teacher, and that
alone--his painting, his poetry, and his conversation all subservient to
that one end. Men watched him with awe or with bewilderment; it was known
that he saw visions continually, perhaps more continually than any modern
man since Swedenborg; and when he painted and drew in pastel what he had
seen, some accepted the record without hesitation, others, like myself,
noticing the academic Graeco-Roman forms, and remembering his early
admiration for the works of Gustave Moreau, divined a subjective element,
but no one doubted his word. One might not think him a good observer, but
no one could doubt that he reported with the most scrupulous care what he
believed himself to have seen; nor did he lack occasional objective
corroboration. Walking with some man in his park--his demesne, as we say
in Ireland--he had seen a visionary church at a particular spot, and the
man had dug and uncovered its foundations; then some woman had met him
with, "Oh, Mr Russell, I am so unhappy," and he had replied, "You will be
perfectly happy this evening at seven o'clock," and left her to her
blushes. She had an appointment with a young man for seven o'clock. I had
heard of this a day or so after the event, and I asked him about it, and
was told it had suddenly come into his head to use those words; but why he
did not know. He and I often quarrelled, because I wanted him to examine
and question his visions, and write them out as they occurred; and still
more because I thought symbolic what he thought real like the men and
women that had passed him on the road. Were they so much a part of his
sub-conscious life that they would have vanished had he submitted them to
question; were they like those voices that only speak, those strange
sights that only show themselves for an instant, when the attention has
been withdrawn; that phantasmagoria of which I had learnt something in
London: and had his verse and his painting a like origin? And was t