and more or
less distinctly according to the lucidities of our minds; "but in my
heart I am _this_."

And in the outcome we all try to seem at least to be _so_, while an
ineffectual rebel struggles passionately, like a beast caught in a trap,
for ends altogether more deep and dangerous, for the rose and the star
and the wildfire,--for beauty and beautiful things. These, we all know
in our darkly vital recesses, are the real needs of life, the obediences
imposed upon us by our crude necessities and jostling proximities, mere
incidentals on our way to those profounder purposes....

And when I write thus of our selves I mean our bodies quite as much as
our imaginations; the two sides of us are covered up alike and put alike
into disguises and unnatural shapes, we are taught and forced to hide
them for the same reasons, from a fear of ourselves and a fear of the
people about us. The sense of beauty, the sense of one's body, the
freedom of thought and of desire and the wonder of life, are all
interwoven strands. I remember that in the Park of Burnmore one great
craving I had was to take off my clothes there altogether, and bathe in
a clear place among loosestrife and meadowsweet, and afterwards lie wet
and naked upon the soft green turf with the sun shining upon me. But I
thought also that that was a very wicked and shameful craving to have,
and I never dared give way to it.

Sec. 3

As I think of myself and all these glowing secrecies and hidden fancies
within, walking along beside old Siddons, and half listening to his
instructive discourse, I see myself as though I was an image of all
humanity under tuition for the social life.

I write "old Siddons," for so he seemed to me then. In truth he was
scarcely a dozen years older than I, and the other day when I exchanged
salutations with his gaitered presence in the Haymarket, on his way I
suppose to the Athenaeum, it struck me that he it is who is now the
younger man. But at Burnmore he was eighteen inches or more above my
head and all the way of school and university beyond me; full of the
world they had fitted him for and eager to impart its doctrines. He went
along in his tweeds that were studiously untidy, a Norfolk jacket of one
clerically-greyish stuff and trousers of another somewhat lighter
pattern, in thick boots, the collar of his calling, and a broad-minded
hat, bearing his face heavenward as he talked, and not so much aware of
me as appreciating the thing