creek upon our left; and far away southward, in the evening light,
lay the long valley like a larger river. We still felt the upland,
however, as a loftier air; and always as, when night comes, nature
exercises some mysterious magic of the dark hour in strange places,
there, as all day long, we seemed to draw closer to earth--not earth as
it is in landscape, a thing of beauty and colour and human kinship, but
earth, the soil, the element, the globe.

This was in both our minds, and I had thought of it before he spoke
after a long pause over the briar pipes that had comraded our talk since
morning. "I can't talk of it now," he said; "it's gone into me in an
hour that you have been years in thinking; but that is what you are to
us." I say the things he said, for I cannot otherwise give his way, and
that trust of love in which these thoughts were born on my lips; all
those years, in many a distant place, I had thought for him almost as
much as for myself. "You knighted us," he said, "and we fight your
cause,"--not knowing that kingship, however great or humble, is but the
lowly knights made one in him who by God's grace can speak the word. "I
have no doubt it's true, what you say; but it is different. I expected
it would be; but we used to speak of nature more than the soul, and of
nature's being a guide. Poor Robin, I remember, began with that." "There
is a sonnet of Arnold's you know," I answered, "that tells another
tale. But I did not learn it from him. And, besides, what else he has to
say is not cheerful. Nothing is wise," I interjected, "that is not
cheerful."

But without repeating the wandering talk of reality with its changeful
tones,--and however serious the matter might be it was never far from a
touch of lightness shuttling in and out like sunshine,--I told him, as
we drove down the dark valley, my hand resting now on his shoulder near
me, how nature is antipodal to the soul; or, if not the antipodes, is
apart from us, and cares not for the virtues we have erected, for
authority and mercy, for justice, chastity, and sacrifice, for nothing
that is man's except the life of the body itself, the race-life, as if
man were a chemical element or a wave-motion of ether that are parts of
physics. "I convinced myself," I said, "that the soul is not a term in
the life of nature, but that nature is in it as a physical vigour and to
it an outward spectacle, whereby the soul acquires a preparation for
immortality, whether