ointed at what he
held to be a scanty reward of his long faith and patience. But if
my own life's work had been, as I proposed, shelved in
expectation of the Lord's imminent advent, I should have cumbered
the ground until this day.

To school, therefore, I returned with a brain full of strange
discords, in a huddled mixture of 'Endymion' and the Book of
Revelation, John Wesley's hymns and 'Midsummer Night's Dream'.
Few boys of my age, I suppose, carried about with them such a
confused throng of immature impressions and contradictory hopes.
I was at one moment devoutly pious, at the next haunted by
visions of material beauty and longing for sensuous impressions.
In my hot and silly brain, Jesus and Pan held sway together, as
in a wayside chapel discordantly and impishly consecrated to
Pagan and to Christian rites. But for the present, as in the
great chorus which so marvellously portrays our double nature,
'the folding-star of Bethlehem' was still dominant. I became more
and more pietistic. Beginning now to versify, I wrote a tragedy
in pale imitation of Shakespeare, but on a Biblical and
evangelistic subject; and odes that were parodies of those in
'Prometheus Unbound', but dealt with the approaching advent of
our Lord and the rapture of His saints. My unwholesome
excitement, bubbling up in this violent way, reached at last a
climax and foamed over.

It was a summer afternoon, and, being now left very free in my
movements, I had escaped from going out with the rest of my
schoolfellows in their formal walk in charge of an usher. I had
been reading a good deal of poetry, but my heart had translated
Apollo and Bacchus into terms of exalted Christian faith. I was
alone, and I lay on a sofa, drawn across a large open window at
the top of the school-house, in a room which was used as a study
by the boys who were 'going up for examination'. I gazed down on
a labyrinth of garden sloping to the sea, which twinkled faintly
beyond the towers of the town. Each of these gardens held a villa
in it, but all the near landscape below me was drowned in
foliage. A wonderful warm light of approaching sunset modelled
the shadows and set the broad summits of the trees in a rich
glow. There was an absolute silence below and around me; a magic
of suspense seemed to keep every topmost twig from waving.

Over my soul there swept an immense wave of emotion. Now, surely,
now the great final change must be approaching. I gazed up into
the te