give a mystic
tinge to his mind. The peasants who dwelt around his father's house
always possessed a peculiar fascination for him; he would watch them as
they sat by their doorway, squatting on their heels, as their custom
is--grave, monotonous, motionless, the smoke from their pipes almost
the sole sign of life. For the Flemish peasant is a strangely inert
creature, his work once done--as languid and lethargic as the canal
that passes by his door. There was one cottage into which the boy would
often peep on his way home from school, the home of seven brothers and
one sister, all old, toothless, worn--working together in the daytime
at their tiny farm; at night sitting in the gloomy kitchen, lit by one
smoky lamp--all looking straight before them, saying not a word; or
when, at rare intervals, a remark was made, taking it up each in turn
and solemnly repeating it, with perhaps the slightest variation in
form. It was amidst influences such as these that his boyhood was
passed, almost isolated from the world, brooding over lives of saints
and mystics at the same time that he studied, and delighted in,
Shakespeare and the Elizabethans, Goethe and Heine. For his taste has
been catholic always; he admires Meredith as he admires Dickens, Hello
and Pascal no less than Schopenhauer. And it is this catholicity, this
open mind, this eager search for truth, that have enabled him to emerge
from the mysticism that once enwrapped him to the clearer daylight of
actual existence; it is this faculty of admiring all that is admirable
in man and in life that some day, perhaps, may take him very far.

It will surprise many who picture him as a mere dreamy decadent, to be
told that he is a man of abiding and abundant cheerfulness, who finds
happiness in the simplest of things. The scent of a flower, the flight
of sea-gulls around a cliff, a cornfield in sunshine--these stir him to
strange delight. A deed of bravery, nobility, or of simple devotion; a
mere brotherly act of kindness, the unconscious sacrifice of the
peasant who toils all day to feed and clothe his children--these awake
his warm and instant sympathy. And with him, too, it is as with De
Quincey when he says, "At no time of my life have I been a person to
hold myself polluted by the touch or approach of any creature that wore
a human shape"; and more than one unhappy outcast, condemned by the
stern law of man, has been gladdened by his ready greeting and welcome.
But, indeed, a