The poetry he recited me was full of his nature and his visions.  Sometimes it told of other lives he believes himself to have lived in other centuries, sometimes of people he had talked to, revealing them to their own minds.  I told him I would write an article upon him and it, and was told in turn that I might do so if I did not mention his name, for he wished to be always “unknown, obscure, impersonal.”  Next day a bundle of his poems arrived, and with them a note in these words:  “Here are copies of verses you said you liked.  I do not think I could ever write or paint any more.  I prepare myself for a cycle of other activities in some other life.  I will make rigid my roots and branches.  It is not now my turn to burst into leaves and flowers.”

The poems were all endeavours to capture some high, impalpable mood in a net of obscure images.  There were fine passages in all, but these were often embedded in thoughts which have evidently a special value to his mind, but are to other men the counters of an unknown coinage.  To them they seem merely so much brass or copper or tarnished silver at the best.  At other times the beauty of the thought was obscured by careless writing as though he had suddenly doubted if writing was not a foolish labour.  He had frequently illustrated his verses with drawings, in which an unperfect anatomy did not altogether hide extreme beauty of feeling.  The faeries in whom he believes have given him many subjects, notably Thomas of Ercildoune sitting motionless in the twilight while a young and beautiful creature leans softly out of the shadow and whispers in his ear.  He had delighted above all in strong effects of colour:  spirits who have upon their heads instead of hair the feathers of peacocks; a phantom reaching from a swirl of flame towards a star; a spirit passing with a globe of iridescent crystal-symbol of the soul-half shut within his hand.  But always under this largess of colour lay some tender homily addressed to man’s fragile hopes.  This spiritual eagerness draws to him all those who, like himself, seek for illumination or else mourn for a joy that has gone.  One of these especially comes to mind.  A winter or two ago he spent much of the night walking up and down upon the mountain talking to an old peasant who, dumb to most men, poured out his cares for him.  Both were unhappy:  X----- because he had then first decided that art and poetry were not for him, and the old peasant because his life was ebbing out with no achievement remaining and no hope left him.  Both how Celtic! how full of striving after a something never to be completely expressed in word or deed.  The peasant was wandering in his mind with prolonged sorrow.  Once he burst out with “God possesses the heavens—­God possesses the heavens—­but He covets the world”; and once he lamented that his old neighbours were gone, and that all had forgotten him:  they used to draw a chair to the fire for him in every cabin, and now they said, “Who is that old fellow there?” “The fret [Irish for doom] is over me,” he repeated, and then went on to talk once more of God and heaven.  More than once also he said, waving his arm towards the mountain, “Only myself knows what happened under the thorn-tree forty years ago”; and as he said it the tears upon his face glistened in the moonlight.