breath would fail. It is a spirit. It is some one who is dead or who
has never lived."


[FN#1] I wrote this sentence long ago. This sadness now seems to me a
part of all peoples who preserve the moods of the ancient peoples of
the world. I am not so pre-occupied with the mystery of Race as I used
to be, but leave this sentence and other sentences like it unchanged.
We once believed them, and have, it may be, not grown wiser.


I asked what he was doing, and found he was clerk in a large shop. His
pleasure, however, was to wander about upon the hills, talking to half-
mad and visionary peasants, or to persuade queer and conscience-
stricken persons to deliver up the keeping of their troubles into his
care. Another night, when I was with him in his own lodging, more than
one turned up to talk over their beliefs and disbeliefs, and sun them
as it were in the subtle light of his mind. Sometimes visions come to
him as he talks with them, and he is rumoured to have told divers
people true matters of their past days and distant friends, and left
them hushed with dread of their strange teacher, who seems scarce more
than a boy, and is so much more subtle than the oldest among them.

The poetry he recited me was full of his nature and his visions.
Sometimes it told of other lives he believes himself to have lived in
other centuries, sometimes of people he had talked to, revealing them
to their own minds. I told him I would write an article upon him and
it, and was told in turn that I might do so if I did not mention his
name, for he wished to be always "unknown, obscure, impersonal." Next
day a bundle of his poems arrived, and with them a note in these words: