faith which transfigured my life for many months into the most beautiful
enthusiasm a man could know,--and which had almost sent me to the
Himalayas!

'That it did not quite achieve that, though much of the light it gave me
still remains, I owe to R.M., who, with no dialectic, but with one bald
question, and the reading of one poem, robbed me of my fairy palace of
Oriental speculation in the twinkling of an eye. Why it went I have
never really quite known; but surely, it was gone, and the wind and the
bare star-light were alone in its place.

'Dear Mac., I have not seen you for ever so long, and surely you have
forgotten how that night, long ago, you asked with such a strange,
almost childlike, simplicity: "_Is_ there a soul?" But I have not
forgotten, nor how I made no answer at all, but only staggered, and how,
with your strange, dreamy voice, you chanted for comfort:--

'"This hot, hard flame with which our bodies burn
Will make some meadow blaze with daffodil;
Ay! and those argent breasts of thine will turn
To water-lilies; the brown fields men till
Will be more fruitful for our love to-night:
Nothing is lost in Nature; all things live in Death's despite.

* * * * *

'"So when men bury us beneath the yew
Thy crimson-stained mouth a rose will be,
And thy soft eyes lush blue-bells dimmed with dew;
And when the white narcissus wantonly