’One day in the beginning of March, coming back from a long walk on the hills, I heard the bleat of the lamb and the impatient cawing of the rook that could not put its nest together in the windy branches, and as I stopped to listen it seemed to me that something passed by in the dusk:  the spring-tide itself seemed to be fleeting across the tillage towards the scant fields.  As the spring-tide advanced I discovered a new likeness to you in the daffodil; it is so shapely a flower.  I should be puzzled to give a reason, but it reminds me of antiquity, and you were always a thing divorced from the Christian ideal.  While mourning you, my poor instincts discovered you in the wind-shaken trees, and in the gaiety of the sun, and the flowers that May gives us.  I shall be gone at the end of July, when the carnations are in bloom, but were I here I am certain many of them would remind me of you.  There have been saints who have loved Nature, but I always wondered how it was so, for Nature is like a woman.  I might have read the Scriptures again and again, and all the arguments that Mr. Poole can put forward, without my faith being in the least shaken.  When the brain alone thinks, the thinking is very thin and impoverished.  It seems to me that the best thinking is done when the whole man thinks, the flesh and the brain together, and for the whole man to think the whole man must live; and the life I have lived hitherto has been a thin life, for my body lived only.  And not even all my body.  My mind and body were separated:  neither were of any use to me.  I owe everything to you.  My case cannot be defined merely as that of a priest who gave up his religion because a pretty woman came by.  He who says that does not try to understand; he merely contents himself with uttering facile commonplace.  What he has to learn is the great oneness in Nature.  There is but one element, and we but one of its many manifestations.  If this were not so, why should your whiteness and colour and gaiety remind me always of the spring-time?

’My pen is running fast, I hardly know what I am writing, but it seems to me that I am beginning to see much clearer.  The mists are dissolving, and life emerges like the world at daybreak.  I am thinking now of an old decrepit house with sagging roof and lichen-covered walls, and all the doors and windows nailed up.  Every generation nailed up a door or a window till all were nailed up.  In the dusty twilight creatures wilt and pray.  About the house the sound of shutters creaking on rusty hinges never ceases.  Your hand touched one, and the shutters fell, and I found myself looking upon the splendid sun shining on hills and fields, wooded prospects with rivers winding through the great green expanses.  At first I dared not look, and withdrew into the shadow tremblingly; but the light drew me forth again, and now I look upon the world without fear.  I am going to leave that decrepit dusty house and mix with my fellows, and maybe blow a horn on the hillside