But
one's greatest debt to a good mother must be simply--herself.
'To the Rev. Father Ignatius for his earnest preaching, which might
almost have made me a monk, had not Thomas Carlyle and his _Heroes_,
especially the lecture on Mahomet, given me to understand the true
significance of a Messiah.
'To Bulwer for his _Zanoni_, which first gave me a hint of the possible
natural "supernatural," and thus for ever saved me from dogmatising in
negatives against the transcendental.
'To Sir Edwin Arnold for his _Light of Asia,_ also to Mr. Sinnett for
his _Esoteric Buddhism,_ books which, coming to me about the same time,
together with some others like them, first gave some occupation to an
"unchartered freedom," gained in many forgotten steps, in the form of a
faith which transfigured my life for many months into the most beautiful
enthusiasm a man could know,--and which had almost sent me to the
Himalayas!
'That it did not quite achieve that, though much of the light it gave me
still remains, I owe to R.M., who, with no dialectic, but with one bald
question, and the reading of one poem, robbed me of my fairy palace of
Oriental speculation in the twinkling of an eye. Why it went I have
never really quite known; but surely, it was gone, and the wind and the
bare star-light were alone in its place.
'Dear Mac., I have not seen you for ever so long, and surely you have
forgotten how that night, long ago, you asked with such a strange,
almost childlike, simplicity: "_Is_ there a soul?" But I have not
forgotten, nor how I made no answer at all, but only staggered, and how,
with your strange, dreamy voice, you chanted for comfort:--
'"This hot, hard flame with which our bodies burn
Will make some meadow blaze with daffodil;
Ay! and those argent breasts of thine will turn
To water-lilies; the brown fields men till
Will be more fruitful for our love to-night:
Nothing is lost in Nature; all things live in Death's despite.
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