with the
haunted recesses of thought, there go an endearing homeliness and
simplicity, a deep human tenderness, a gentle friendliness, a something
childlike. He has written of her, "the presence that rose thus so
strangely beside the waters," to whom all experience had been "but as
the sound of lyres and flutes," and he has written of "The Child in the
House." Among all "the strange dyes, strange colours, and curious
odours, and work of the artist's hands," one never misses "the face of
one's friend"; and, in all its wanderings, the soul never strays far
from the white temples of the gods and the sound of running water.

It is by virtue of this combination of humanity, edification, and
aesthetic delight that Walter Pater is unique among the great teachers
and artists of our time.

XXIII

THE MYSTERY OF "FIONA MACLEOD" [1]

[1]_William Sharp (Fiona Macleod)_. A Memoir, compiled
by his wife, Elizabeth A. Sharp. (Duffield & Co.)
_The Writings of Fiona Macleod_. Uniform edition. Arranged
by Mrs. William Sharp. (Duffield & Co.)

In the fascinating memoir of her husband, which Mrs. William Sharp has
written with so much dignity and tact, and general biographic skill, she
dwells with particular fondness of recollection on the two years of
their life at Phenice Croft, a charming cottage they had taken in the
summer of 1892 at Rudgwick in Sussex, seven miles from Horsham, the
birthplace of Shelley. Still fresh in my memory is a delightful visit I
paid them there, and I was soon afterwards to recall with special
significance a conversation I had with Mrs. Sharp, as four of us walked
out one evening after dinner in a somewhat melancholy twilight, the
glow-worms here and there trimming their ghostly lamps by the wayside,
and the nightjar churring its hoarse lovesong somewhere in the
thickening dusk.

"Will," Mrs. Sharp confided to me, was soon to have a surprise for his
friends in a fuller and truer expression of himself than his work had
so far attained, but the nature of that expression Mrs. Sharp did not
confide--more than to hint that there were powers and qualities in her
husband's make-up that had hitherto lain dormant, or had, at all events,
been but little drawn upon.

Mrs. Sharp was thus vaguely hinting at the future "Fiona Macleod,"
for it was at Rudgwick, we learn, that that so long mysterious
literary entity sprang into imaginative being with _Pharais_. _Pharais_
was published in 1894,