prescribed path, or
make his visits to any time-table. I think I heard the far-off beating
of his wings this morning, as we swept up-channel towards the Clyde,
and I think I was promised deeper knowledge of Love and Life than
heretofore. I know that with the dawn came a sense of infinite power
and vision, as though the cool wind were the rushing music of the
spheres, and the rosy cloudland the outer portals of the Kingdom of
God.

And, indeed, I have had my reward. I had come from Italy, where I had
wandered through churches and galleries, and had seen the supreme
excellence of a generation whose like we shall not see again, and as
we came up that stately firth and discovered a generation as supreme
in their art as the Italians of the sixteenth century were in theirs,
I held my breath.

From Greenock to Glasgow resounded the clangour of hammers and the
thunder of mechanism. Plate by plate, rivet by rivet, and beam by
beam, there grew before my very eyes the shapes of half a hundred
ships. I see more clearly still, now, what I meant by insisting on the
conservation of intellectual energy. My friend points piteously to
past periods, and says, "They can't do it now, old man." And I smile
and point to those steel steamships, growing in grace and beauty as I
watch, and I say, "They couldn't do _that_ then, old man!" Just as the
physical energy in this universe is a definite totality, so is the
intellectual or spiritual energy. The Da Vinci of to-day leaves his
Last Supper undepicted; but he drives a Tube through the London clay.
Cellini no longer casts a Perseus and alternates a murder with a
_Trattato_; he builds engines and railroads and ships. Michael Angelo
smites no sibyls from the living stone, but he has carved the face of
the very earth to his design. And though no fair youth steps forth to
paint the unearthly nimbus-light around the brows of his beloved
madonna, I count it fair exchange that from every reef and point of
this our sea-girt isle there shines a radiance none can watch without
a catching of the breath.

V

It is a far call from such musings to the Skipper, whom I encountered
as I was in the midst of them. It is only the bald truth to say that
I had not then considered him to be a human being. Even now I am
uncertain how to describe him, for we do not meet often. He is a tall,
powerfully built, slow-moving man, strong with the strength of those
who live continually at sea. Something apart f