of this kind
which we have all felt when we met great poets or politicians, but which
never finds its way into the newspapers. I mean the impression that
they are much older than we thought they were. We connect great men with
their great triumphs, which generally happened some years ago, and many
recruits enthusiastic for the thin Napoleon of Marengo must have found
themselves in the presence of the fat Napoleon of Leipzic.

I remember reading a newspaper account of how a certain rising
politician confronted the House of Lords with the enthusiasm almost of
boyhood. It described how his "brave young voice" rang in the rafters.
I also remember that I met him some days after, and he was considerably
older than my own father. I mention this truth for only one purpose: all
this generalisation leads up to only one fact--the fact that I once met
a great man who was younger than I expected.

.....

I had come over the wooded wall from the villages about Epsom, and down
a stumbling path between trees towards the valley in which Dorking lies.
A warm sunlight was working its way through the leafage; a sunlight
which though of saintless gold had taken on the quality of evening. It
was such sunlight as reminds a man that the sun begins to set an instant
after noon. It seemed to lessen as the wood strengthened and the road
sank.

I had a sensation peculiar to such entangled descents; I felt that the
treetops that closed above me were the fixed and real things, certain as
the level of the sea; but that the solid earth was every instant failing
under my feet. In a little while that splendid sunlight showed only in
splashes, like flaming stars and suns in the dome of green sky. Around
me in that emerald twilight were trunks of trees of every plain or
twisted type; it was like a chapel supported on columns of every earthly
and unearthly style of architecture.

Without intention my mind grew full of fancies on the nature of the
forest; on the whole philosophy of mystery and force. For the meaning of
woods is the combination of energy with complexity. A forest is not
in the least rude or barbarous; it is only dense with delicacy. Unique
shapes that an artist would copy or a philosopher watch for years if he
found them in an open plain are here mingled and confounded; but it is
not a darkness of deformity. It is a darkness of life; a darkness of
perfection. And I began to think how much of the highest human obscurity
is like this, an