is another to dramatize one's consciousness
in this rather childish fashion. There seems more than a suspicion of
pose in such writing: though one cannot but feel that William Sharp was
right in thinking that the real "Fiona Macleod" was asleep at the
moment. At the same time, William Sharp seems unmistakably to have been
endowed with what I suppose one has to call "psychic" powers--though the
word has been "soiled with all ignoble use"--and to be the possessor
in a considerable degree of that mysterious "sight" or sixth sense
attributed to men and women of Gaelic blood. Mrs. Sharp tells a curious
story of his mood immediately preceding that flight to the Isles of
which I have been writing. He had been haunted the night before by the
sound of the sea. It seemed to him that he heard it splashing in the
night against the walls of his London dwelling. So real it had seemed
that he had risen from his bed and looked out of the window, and even in
the following afternoon, in his study, he could still hear the waves
dashing against the house. "A telegram had come for him that morning,"
writes Mrs. Sharp, "and I took it to his study. I could get no answer.
I knocked, louder, then louder,--at last he opened the door with a
curiously dazed look in his face. I explained. He answered: 'Ah, I
could not hear you for the sound of the waves!'"

His last spoken words have an eerie suggestiveness in this connection.
Writing of his death on the 12th of December, 1905, Mrs. Sharp says:
"About three o'clock, with his devoted friend Alec Hood by his side, he
suddenly leant forward with shining eyes and exclaimed in a tone of
joyous recognition, 'Oh, the beautiful "Green Life," again!' and the
next moment sank back in my arms with the contented sigh, 'Ah, all is
well!'"

"The green life" was a phrase often on Sharp's lips, and stood for him
for that mysterious life of elemental things to which he was almost
uncannily sensitive, and into which he seemed able strangely to merge
himself, of which too his writings as "Fiona Macleod" prove him to have
had "invisible keys." It is this, so to say, conscious pantheism,
this kinship with the secret forces and subtle moods of nature, this
responsiveness to her mystic spiritual "intimations," that give to those
writings their peculiar significance and value. In the external lore of
nature William Sharp was exceptionally learned. Probably no writer in
English, with the exceptions of George Meredith and