d how much men have misunderstood it. People will tell
you, for instance, that theology became elaborate because it was dead.
Believe me, if it had been dead it would never have become elaborate; it
is only the live tree that grows too many branches.

.....

These trees thinned and fell away from each other, and I came out into
deep grass and a road. I remember being surprised that the evening was
so far advanced; I had a fancy that this valley had a sunset all to
itself. I went along that road according to directions that had been
given me, and passed the gateway in a slight paling beyond which the
wood changed only faintly to a garden. It was as if the curious courtesy
and fineness of that character I was to meet went out from him upon the
valley; for I felt on all these things the finger of that quality which
the old English called "faerie"; it is the quality which those can never
understand who think of the past as merely brutal; it is an ancient
elegance such as there is in trees. I went through the garden and saw
an old man sitting by a table, looking smallish in his big chair. He
was already an invalid, and his hair and beard were both white; not like
snow, for snow is cold and heavy, but like something feathery, or even
fierce; rather they were white like the white thistledown. I came up
quite close to him; he looked at me as he put out his frail hand, and
I saw of a sudden that his eyes were startlingly young. He was the one
great man of the old world whom I have met who was not a mere statue
over his own grave.

He was deaf and he talked like a torrent. He did not talk about the
books he had written; he was far too much alive for that. He talked
about the books he had not written. He unrolled a purple bundle of
romances which he had never had time to sell. He asked me to write one
of the stories for him, as he would have asked the milkman, if he had
been talking to the milkman. It was a splendid and frantic story, a sort
of astronomical farce. It was all about a man who was rushing up to the
Royal Society with the only possible way of avoiding an earth-destroying
comet; and it showed how, even on this huge errand, the man was tripped
up at every other minute by his own weakness and vanities; how he lost
a train by trifling or was put in gaol for brawling. That is only one
of them; there were ten or twenty more. Another, I dimly remember, was
a version of the fall of Parnell; the idea that a quite honest man