I talked of this one day with Narcissus, and some time after he sent me a few notes headed ‘Spiritual Pastors,’ in which he had striven to follow the beautiful example set by Marcus Aurelius, in the anxiously loving acknowledgment with which he opens his meditations.  I know he regarded it as miserably inefficient; but as it does actually indicate some of the more individual side of his experience, and is, moreover, characteristic in its style, I shall copy a few passages from it here:—­

’To some person or persons unknown exceeding gratitude for the suggestion, in some dim talk, antenatal it would almost seem, that Roman Catholics might, after all, be “saved.”  Blessed fecundating suggestion, that was the earliest loophole!

’To my father I owe a mind that, once set on a clue, must follow it, if need be, to the nethermost darkness, though he has chosen to restrict the operation of his own within certain limits; and to my mother a natural leaning to the transcendental side of an alternative, which has saved me so many a time when reason had thrown me into the abyss.  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.