To these choice spirits, these enthusiastic and confiding friends, his house was the House of the Interpreter.  The little back-room, kitchen, bedroom, studio, and parlor in one, plain and neat, had for them a kind of enchantment.  That royal presence lighted up the “hole” into a palace.  The very walls widened with the greatness of his soul.  The windows that opened on the muddy Thames seemed to overlook the river of the water of life.  Among the scant furnishings, his high thoughts, set in noble words, gleamed like apples of gold in pictures of silver.  Over the gulf that yawns between two worlds he flung a glorious arch, and walked tranquilly back and forth.  Heaven was as much a matter-of-fact to him as earth.  Of sacred things he spoke with a familiarity which, to those who did not understand him, seemed either madness or blasphemy; but his friends never misunderstood.  With one exception, none who knew him personally ever thought of calling his sanity in question.  To them he was a sweet, gentle, lovable man.  They felt the truth of his life.  They saw that

  “Only that fine madness still he did retain
  Which rightly should possess a poet’s brain.”

Imagination was to him the great reality.  The external, that which makes the chief consciousness of most men, was to him only staging, an incumbrance, and uncouth, but to be endured and made the most of.  The world of the imagination was the true world.  Imagination bodied forth the forms of things unknown in a deeper sense, perhaps, than the great dramatist meant.  His poet’s pen, his painter’s pencil turned them to shapes, and gave to airy nothings a local habitation and a name.  Nay, he denied that they were nothings.  He rather asserted the actual existence of his visions,—­an existence as real, though not of the same nature, as those of the bed or the table.  Imagination was a kind of sixth sense, and its objects were as real as the objects of the other senses.  This sense he believed to exist, though latent, in every one, and to be susceptible of development by cultivation.  This is surely a very different thing from madness.  Neither is it the low superstition of ghosts.  He recounted no miracle, nothing supernatural.  It was only that by strenuous effort and untiring devotion he had penetrated beyond the rank and file—­but not beyond the possibilities of the rank and file—­into the unseen world.  Undoubtedly this power finally assumed undue proportions.  In his isolation it led him on too unresistingly.  His generation knew him not.  It neglected where it should have trained, and stared where it should have studied.  He was not wily enough to conceal or gloss over his views.  Often silent with congenial companions, he would thrust in with boisterous assertion in the company of captious opponents.  Set upon by the unfriendly and the conventional, he wilfully hurled out his wild utterances, exaggerating everything, scorning all explanation or modification, goading peculiarities into reckless extravagance, on purpose to puzzle and startle, and so avenging himself by playing off upon those who attempted to play off upon him.  To the gentle, the reverent, the receptive, the simple, he, too, was gentle and reverent.