ndstill--Nature is contingent, excessive and mystical essentially."

Have we here contradiction simply, a man converted from one faith to
its opposite? Or is it only dialectic circling, like the opposite
points on the rim of a revolving disc, one moving up, one down, but
replacing one another endlessly, while the whole disc never moves? If
it be this latter--Mr. Blood himself uses the image--the dialectic is
too pure for me to catch: a deeper man must mediate the monistic with
the pluralistic Blood. Let my incapacity be castigated, if my
"Subject" ever reads this article, but let me treat him from now
onwards as the simply pluralistic mystic which my reading of the rest
of him suggests. I confess to some dread of my own fate at his hands.
In making so far an ordinary transcendental idealist of him, I have
taken liberties, running separate sentences together, inverting their
order, and even altering single words, for all which I beg pardon; but
in treating my author from now onwards as a pluralist, interpretation
is easier, and my hands can be less stained (if they _are_ stained)
with exegetic blood.

I have spoken of his verbal felicity, and alluded to his poetry.
Before passing to his mystic gospel, I will refresh the reader
(doubtless now fatigued with so much dialectic) by a sample of his
verse. "The Lion of the Nile" is an allegory of the "champion spirit
of the world" in its various incarnations.

Thus it begins:--

"Whelped on the desert sands, and desert bred
From dugs whose sustenance was blood alone--
A life translated out of other lives,
I grew the king of beasts; the hurricane
Leaned like a feather on my royal fell;
I took the Hyrcan tiger by the scruff
And tore him piecemeal; my hot bowels laughed
And my fangs yearned for prey. Earth was my lair:
I slept on the red desert without fear:
I roamed the jungle depths with less design
Than e'en to lord their solitude; on crags
That cringe from lightning--black and blasted fronts
That crouch beneath the wind-bleared stars, I told
My heart's fruition to the universe,
And all night long, roaring my fierce defy,
I thrilled the wilderness with aspen terrors,
And challenged death and life. . . ."

Again:

"Naked I stood upon the raked arena
Beneath the pennants of Vespasian,
While seried thousands gazed--strangers from Caucasus,
Men of the Grecian Isles, and Barbary princes,
To see me grapple with the c