religious one, it
seems to me; and I am glad to think that it was your sunny face that
raised up my crushed instincts, that brought me back to life, and ever
since you have been associated in my mind with the sun and the
spring-tide.

'One day in the beginning of March, coming back from a long walk on the
hills, I heard the bleat of the lamb and the impatient cawing of the
rook that could not put its nest together in the windy branches, and as
I stopped to listen it seemed to me that something passed by in the
dusk: the spring-tide itself seemed to be fleeting across the tillage
towards the scant fields. As the spring-tide advanced I discovered a new
likeness to you in the daffodil; it is so shapely a flower. I should be
puzzled to give a reason, but it reminds me of antiquity, and you were
always a thing divorced from the Christian ideal. While mourning you, my
poor instincts discovered you in the wind-shaken trees, and in the
gaiety of the sun, and the flowers that May gives us. I shall be gone at
the end of July, when the carnations are in bloom, but were I here I am
certain many of them would remind me of you. There have been saints who
have loved Nature, but I always wondered how it was so, for Nature is
like a woman. I might have read the Scriptures again and again, and all
the arguments that Mr. Poole can put forward, without my faith being in
the least shaken. When the brain alone thinks, the thinking is very thin
and impoverished. It seems to me that the best thinking is done when the
whole man thinks, the flesh and the brain together, and for the whole
man to think the whole man must live; and the life I have lived hitherto
has been a thin life, for my body lived only. And not even all my body.
My mind and body were separated: neither were of any use to me. I owe
everything to you. My case cannot be defined merely as that of a priest
who gave up his religion because a pretty woman came by. He who says
that does not try to understand; he merely contents himself with
uttering facile commonplace. What he has to learn is the great oneness
in Nature. There is but one element, and we but one of its many
manifestations. If this were not so, why should your whiteness and
colour and gaiety remind me always of the spring-time?

'My pen is running fast, I hardly know what I am writing, but it seems
to me that I am beginning to see much clearer. The mists are dissolving,
and life emerges like the world at daybreak. I am