al self and look
back on my former bondage in amaze, even as I now look down on the dizzy
slums where I am and yet am not! It cannot be that I came up out of the
depths for nothing. If I could pierce my heart and write red lines, I
might perhaps tell the truth. But only a High Silence meets me, and I do
not understand. In letting myself down to the bottomless, I discovered I
could not stand it long enough. I am dumbly dissatisfied. I feel like a
diver who has nigh strangled himself to bring up a handful of seaweed,
and so feels he must down again--and again--until he attains somewhere
the holy meaning of Life."

Terry feels that somehow deep in his life he has been crucified, that
society has nailed him to the cross:

"I was alone on the cross and with bloodshot, beseeching eyes beheld
the world objectively. Yet I was aware of a harmony beyond me, though
not in me or around me."

It is this "harmony beyond," this religious sense of "something far more
deeply interfused" which, ever conscious in the idealist's mind, makes
the concrete vision of everyday fact so ugly, leads to anarchism of
feeling profound and constant.

But in this world, which as a whole the heart rejects--"my heart," said
Terry, "is the last analysis of all things"--the idealist sees things of
beauty which constitute for him the elements of perfection, elements
which in some future state he dreams may be fully realised in a social
whole.

"I saw a fine thing from the window to-day," Terry wrote, "a thing of
sheer delight, the complete transfiguration of a human being. An Italian
street labourer came into the yard and sprawled on the grass to eat his
own lunch. He was bandy-legged from being coaxed to stand alone too
soon. But he had a most wonderful face; all the mobility which toil had
banished from his form must have sought refuge in his eyes and his
caressing countenance. Catching sight of some children playing 'house,'
he jumped up and in a most charming way offered them all of his cakes
and went back to his luncheon. The children instinctively brought him
back some of the cakes, which he not only refused, but offered them the
rest of his food. They gathered in a semicircle while he spoke to them.
There came something in his face and attitude which I have seen many
'cultured' people vainly attempt. He absolutely was one of them; the
children stood spell-bound, dazed at the sudden transformation of a man
into a child. The imagination that can