nture which his nature in
real life denied him. The verses uplifted him in a way that made his
recent timidity seem the mere mood of a moment, or at least negligible.
His memory, as one thing suggested another, began to give up its dead,
and some of Blake's drawings, seen recently in London with prodigious
effect, began to pass vividly before his mental vision.

The symbolism of what he was reading doubtless suggested the memory. He
felt himself caught in the great invisible nets of wonder that forever
swept the world. The littleness of modern life, compared to that ancient
and profound spirit which sought the permanent things of the soul,
haunted him with curious insistence. He suffered a keen, though somewhat
mixed realization of his actual insignificance, yet of his potential
sublimity could he but identify himself with his ultimate Self in the
region of vision.... His soul was aware of finding itself alternately
ruffled and exalted as he read ... and pondered ... as he visualized to
some degree the giant Splendors, the wonderful Wheels, the spirit Wings
and Faces and all the other symbols of potent imagery evoked by the
imagination of that old Hebrew world....

So that when, an hour later, pacified and sleepy, he rose to go to bed,
this poetry seems to have left a very marked effect upon his
mind--mingled, naturally enough, with the thought of Mr. Skale. For on
his way across the floor, having adjusted the fire-screen, he distinctly
remembered thinking what a splendid "study" the clergyman would have made
for one of Blake's representations of the Deity--the flowing beard, the
great nose, the imposing head and shoulders, the potentialities of the
massive striding figure, surrounded by a pictorial suggestion of all the
sound-forces he was forever talking about....

This thought was his last, and it was without fear of any kind. Merely,
he insists, that his imagination was touched, and in a manner perfectly
accountable, considering the ingredients of its contents at the time.

And so he hopped nimbly into bed. On the little table beside him stood
the candle and the copy of the Hebrew text he had been reading, with its
parallel columns in the two languages. His Jaeger slippers were beneath
the chair, his clothes, carefully folded, on the sofa, his collar, studs
and necktie in a row on the top of the mahogany chest of drawers. On the
mantelpiece stood the glass jar of heather, filled that very day by
Miriam. He saw it