would not for an instant go back. I have every
now and then, on breezy sunny mornings or after rain, an intense gush
of yearning for the peculiar unconscious delight--the index of
perfect physical health--of childhood; but I never deliberately wish
that things were otherwise. I enjoy nature more, far more, than ever
I did. The signs of spring are a deep and constant joy to me. I can
lie down by the stream, and watch the water flowing and the flowers
bending and stirring and the animals that run busily about, and be
absolutely absorbed, without a thought of myself or even other
people. This I never could do before, and it has been sent me, I
often think, as a kind of alleviation. I have had it ever since I
settled here at Tredennis; and altogether I feel the stronger and
the more content for all this suffering and the inevitable end, which
can not be far off. No; I wouldn't change, even with you, my dear
Chris, or even with Edward"--as that superb piece of physical
vitality crossed the lawn.

"When I first came," he told me, "quite at first, I seemed to have
lost my hold of nature--to be discordant and out of joint with her.
On those bright still mornings we so often have here in the early
summer, I seemed to be only a sad spectator, not a part of it all.
The sunset over the hills there, and the deliberate red glow of the
creek, all seemed to mock me. Even Edward, fond as he was of me,
seemed to have no real connection with me. I was isolated and
despairing. But very gradually, like the dispersing of a cloud, it
came back. I began again to feel myself a performer in the drama, not
a gloomy spectator of it--there must be the sufferer, the condemned,
to make the tragedy complete, and they may be enacted well--till the
sense of God's Fatherhood came back to me. So that I can be and feel
myself a part of the vast economy, diseased and inefficient though I
am--feel that I am one with the life that throbs in the trees and
water, and that forces itself up at every cranny and nestles in every
ledge--can wait patiently for my move, the transference of my vital
energy--as strong as ever, it seems to me, though the engines are
weaker--to some other portion of the frame of things."

He spoke of spiritualism with great contempt. "The more I see of
spiritualists and the less I see of phenomena," he said, "the more
discontented with it I am. It is nothing but a fashionable
drawing-room game."

He dwelt a good deal on the subjective