masters or old Flemish tapestries, called out always from afar
the recollection of the flame in those perishing little petals, as it
pulsed gradually out of them, kept long in the drawers of an old
cabinet.

[186] Also then, for the first time, he seemed to experience a
passionateness in his relation to fair outward objects, an inexplicable
excitement in their presence, which disturbed him, and from which he
half longed to be free. A touch of regret or desire mingled all night
with the remembered presence of the red flowers, and their perfume in
the darkness about him; and the longing for some undivined, entire
possession of them was the beginning of a revelation to him, growing
ever clearer, with the coming of the gracious summer guise of fields
and trees and persons in each succeeding year, of a certain, at times
seemingly exclusive, predominance in his interests, of beautiful
physical things, a kind of tyranny of the senses over him.

In later years he came upon philosophies which occupied him much in the
estimate of the proportion of the sensuous and the ideal elements in
human knowledge, the relative parts they bear in it; and, in his
intellectual scheme, was led to assign very little to the abstract
thought, and much to its sensible vehicle or occasion. Such
metaphysical speculation did but reinforce what was instinctive in his
way of receiving the world, and for him, everywhere, that sensible
vehicle or occasion became, perhaps only too surely, the necessary
concomitant of any perception of things, real enough to be of any
weight or reckoning, in his house of thought. There were times when he
could think of the [187] necessity he was under of associating all
thoughts to touch and sight, as a sympathetic link between himself and
actual, feeling, living objects; a protest in favour of real men and
women against mere grey, unreal abstractions; and he remembered
gratefully how the Christian religion, hardly less than the religion of
the ancient Greeks, translating so much of its spiritual verity into
things that may be seen, condescends in part to sanction this
infirmity, if so it be, of our human existence, wherein the world of
sense is so much with us, and welcomed this thought as a kind of keeper
and sentinel over his soul therein. But certainly, he came more and
more to be unable to care for, or think of soul but as in an actual
body, or of any world but that wherein are water and trees, and where
men and w