on in his
intellectual scheme all subsequent experience did but tend still
further to realise and define. Some ideal, hieratic persons he would
always need to occupy it and keep a warmth there. And he could hardly
understand those who felt no such need at all, finding themselves quite
happy without such heavenly companionship, and sacred double of their
life, beside them.

Thus a constant substitution of the typical for the actual took place
in his thoughts. Angels might be met by the way, under English elm or
beech-tree; mere messengers seemed like angels, bound on celestial
errands; a deep mysticity brooded over real meetings and partings;
marriages were made in heaven; and deaths also, with hands of angels
thereupon, to bear soul and body quietly asunder, each to its [195]
appointed rest. All the acts and accidents of daily life borrowed a
sacred colour and significance; the very colours of things became
themselves weighty with meanings like the sacred stuffs of Moses'
tabernacle, full of penitence or peace. Sentiment, congruous in the
first instance only with those divine transactions, the deep, effusive
unction of the House of Bethany, was assumed as the due attitude for
the reception of our every-day existence; and for a time he walked
through the world in a sustained, not unpleasurable awe, generated by
the habitual recognition, beside every circumstance and event of life,
of its celestial correspondent.

Sensibility--the desire of physical beauty--a strange biblical awe,
which made any reference to the unseen act on him like solemn
music--these qualities the child took away with him, when, at about the
age of twelve years, he left the old house, and was taken to live in
another place. He had never left home before, and, anticipating much
from this change, had long dreamed over it, jealously counting the days
till the time fixed for departure should come; had been a little
careless about others even, in his strong desire for it--when Lewis
fell sick, for instance, and they must wait still two days longer. At
last the morning came, very fine; and all things--the very pavement
with its dust, at the roadside--seemed to have a white, pearl-like
lustre in them. They were to travel by a [196] favourite road on which
he had often walked a certain distance, and on one of those two
prisoner days, when Lewis was sick, had walked farther than ever
before, in his great desire to reach the new place. They had started