beside him in his coming and [68] going, to those divinations of a
living and companionable spirit at work in all things, of which he had
become aware from time to time in his old philosophic readings--in
Plato and others, last but not least, in Aurelius. Through one
reflection upon another, he passed from such instinctive divinations,
to the thoughts which give them logical consistency, formulating at
last, as the necessary exponent of our own and the world's life, that
reasonable Ideal to which the Old Testament gives the name of Creator,
which for the philosophers of Greece is the Eternal Reason, and in the
New Testament the Father of Men--even as one builds up from act and
word and expression of the friend actually visible at one's side, an
ideal of the spirit within him.

In this peculiar and privileged hour, his bodily frame, as he could
recognise, although just then, in the whole sum of its capacities, so
entirely possessed by him--Nay! actually his very self--was yet
determined by a far-reaching system of material forces external to it,
a thousand combining currents from earth and sky. Its seemingly active
powers of apprehension were, in fact, but susceptibilities to
influence. The perfection of its capacity might be said to depend on
its passive surrender, as of a leaf on the wind, to the motions of the
great stream of physical energy without it. And might not the
intellectual frame also, still [69] more intimately himself as in truth
it was, after the analogy of the bodily life, be a moment only, an
impulse or series of impulses, a single process, in an intellectual or
spiritual system external to it, diffused through all time and
place--that great stream of spiritual energy, of which his own
imperfect thoughts, yesterday or to-day, would be but the remote, and
therefore imperfect pulsations? It was the hypothesis (boldest, though
in reality the most conceivable of all hypotheses) which had dawned on
the contemplations of the two opposed great masters of the old Greek
thought, alike:--the "World of Ideas," existent only because, and in so
far as, they are known, as Plato conceived; the "creative,
incorruptible, informing mind," supposed by Aristotle, so sober-minded,
yet as regards this matter left something of a mystic after all. Might
not this entire material world, the very scene around him, the
immemorial rocks, the firm marble, the olive-gardens, the falling
water, be themselves but reflections in,