who deals mainly with
spiritual problems, and who, in doing so, is reticent and reverent, can
scarcely hope to draw the mob at his wheels. In each of his three best
books, Dr. Macdonald has traced the growth of a soul towards freedom.
His conception of freedom is a reasoned but absolute submission to a
Divine Will; a sense of absorption in the manifest intent of a guiding
Power which is wholly loving and wholly wise. To all who are able to
read him he is exquisitely interesting and delightful, and to some he
appeals with the authority of a prophet and divinely-appointed guide.
Along with this experience of abiding faith in him goes a dash of
mysticism, of pantheism. He is essentially a poet, and had he chosen to
expend more labour upon his verse he might have risen to high rank on
that side. But with him the thing to be said has seemed vastly more
important than the way of saying it, and he has, perhaps rightly,
disdained to be laborious in the mere texture of his verse. It is
rational to argue that if the poetic, inspiration is not vital enough
to find an immediate expression it is not true enough to make it worth
while to remould and recast it. It would seem--judging by results--that
Dr. Macdonald's conception of a lyric is of something wholly
spontaneous. Be this as it may, the poetic cast of his mind is revealed
in his prose with greater freedom and a completer charm than in his
verse. The best of him is the atmosphere he carries. It is not possible
to read his books and not to know him for a brave, sincere, and loyal
man, large both in heart and brain, and they purify and tone the mind
in just such fashion as the air of mountain, moor, or sea purifies and
tones the body.

The worthiest of his successors is Mr. J. M. Barrie, who has much in
common with him, though he displays differences of a very essential
kind. Mr. Barrie has no such spiritual obsession as besets his elder. He
has the national reverence for sacred things, but it is probably rather
habitual and racial than dogmatic. I think his greatest charm lies in
the fact that he is at once old and new fashioned. He loves to deal with
a bygone form of life, a form of life which he is too young to remember
in all its intricacies, whilst he is not too young to have heard of it
plenteously at first hand, or to have known many of its exemplars. Few
things of so happy a sort can befall a child of imagination as to be
born on such a borderland of time. About him is