t
home or shelter, picking up a few pence by day, selling matches or
fetching cabs, and sleeping under the archways of Covent Garden Market
at night. At last, in the very depth of his misery, he was sought out
and rescued by the editor of the paper to whom he had sent _Health and
Holiness_ and some of his poems. This saved him, his work brought him
good friends, and he was enabled to write his wonderful poetry. These
terrible experiences, which would have quenched the faith of the
ordinary man and led him to despair, with the poet mystic sought
expression in those six triumphant verses found among his papers when he
died,[82] verses charged with mystic passion, which assert the solid
reality of spiritual things, and tell us that to the outcast and the
wanderer every place was holy ground, Charing Cross was the gate of
heaven, and that he beheld--

Christ walking on the water
Not of Gennesareth, but Thames!

Through all that he writes there breathes the spirit of mystic devotion
and aspiration, but the following characteristics and beliefs may be
specially noted.

(1) His reverence of childhood. He sees in the child something of the
divinity which Vaughan and Wordsworth saw, and his poems to children,
such as _Daisy_ and _The Poppy_, have a special quality of passionate
worship all their own.

(2) His attitude towards the beauty of woman. This is entirely mystical,
and is akin to the view of Plato and of Donne. He shares their belief
that love is but the power to catch sight of the beauty of the soul,
which shines through and actually moulds the beauty of face and body.

How should I gauge what beauty is her dole,
Who cannot see her countenance for her soul,
As birds see not the casement for the sky?
And, as 'tis check they prove its presence by,
I know not of her body till I find
My flight debarred the heaven of her mind.

_Her Portrait._

(3) His attraction towards the continual change and renewal of nature,
not only of the movement of life to death, but of death to life. He
broods over the changing cycles of the year, winter and spring, decay
and re-birth, and he sees in them a profound and far-reaching symbolism.
This is magnificently expressed in the _Ode to the Setting Sun_, where
he paints a picture, unmatched in English verse, of the sun sinking to
rest amid the splendours gathered round him in his fall. The poem is
charged with mystic symbolism, the main thought of