dead gods in the British Museum,
where later, in an eloquent passage at the end of one of his essays, he
pictures a Japanese Buddha, "chambered with forgotten divinities of
Egypt or Babylon under the gloom of a pea soup fog," trembling faintly
at the roar of London. "All to what end?" he asks indignantly. "To aid
another Alma Tadema to paint the beauty of another vanished civilisation
or to illustrate an English dictionary of Buddhism; perhaps to inspire
some future Laureate with a metaphor startling as Tennyson's figure of
the 'Oiled and curled Assyrian Bull'? Will they be preserved in vain?
Each idol shaped by human faith remains the shell of truth eternally
divine, and even the shell itself may hold a ghostly power. The soft
serenity, the passionless tenderness of those Buddha faces might yet
give peace of soul to a West weary of creeds, transformed into
conventions, eager for the coming of another teacher to proclaim, 'I
have the same feeling for the High as the Low, for the moral as the
immoral, for the depraved as for the virtuous, for those holding
sectarian views and false opinions as for those whose beliefs are good
and true.'"

We can see him sitting on the parapet of the dock wall, watching the
white-winged ships, "swift Hermae of traffic--ghosts of the infinite
ocean," put out to sea, some of them bound for those tropical lands of
which he dreamed; others coming in, landing sphinx-like, oblique-eyed
little men from that country in the Far East of which he was one day
destined to become the interpreter.

We know of nothing that he wrote at this time, but no doubt many were
the sheets--destroyed then and there as dangerous and heretical
stuff--that fell into Catherine Delaney's hands. What she could not
destroy, were the indelible visions and impressions, bitten deep by the
aqua-fortis of memory on the surface of his sensitive brain.

"One summer evening, twenty-five years ago, in a London park, I heard a
girl say 'good-night' to somebody passing by. Nothing but those two
little words--'good-night.' Who she was I do not know. I never even saw
her face, and I never heard that voice again. But still, after the
passing of one hundred seasons, the memory of her 'Good-night' brings a
double thrill incomprehensible of pleasure and pain--pain and pleasure,
doubtless, not of me, not of my own existence, but of pre-existence and
dead suns.

"For that which makes the charm of a voice thus heard but once cannot be