To school, therefore, I returned with a brain full of strange discords, in a huddled mixture of ‘Endymion’ and the Book of Revelation, John Wesley’s hymns and ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream’.  Few boys of my age, I suppose, carried about with them such a confused throng of immature impressions and contradictory hopes.  I was at one moment devoutly pious, at the next haunted by visions of material beauty and longing for sensuous impressions.  In my hot and silly brain, Jesus and Pan held sway together, as in a wayside chapel discordantly and impishly consecrated to Pagan and to Christian rites.  But for the present, as in the great chorus which so marvellously portrays our double nature, ‘the folding-star of Bethlehem’ was still dominant.  I became more and more pietistic.  Beginning now to versify, I wrote a tragedy in pale imitation of Shakespeare, but on a Biblical and evangelistic subject; and odes that were parodies of those in ‘Prometheus Unbound’, but dealt with the approaching advent of our Lord and the rapture of His saints.  My unwholesome excitement, bubbling up in this violent way, reached at last a climax and foamed over.

It was a summer afternoon, and, being now left very free in my movements, I had escaped from going out with the rest of my schoolfellows in their formal walk in charge of an usher.  I had been reading a good deal of poetry, but my heart had translated Apollo and Bacchus into terms of exalted Christian faith.  I was alone, and I lay on a sofa, drawn across a large open window at the top of the school-house, in a room which was used as a study by the boys who were ‘going up for examination’.  I gazed down on a labyrinth of garden sloping to the sea, which twinkled faintly beyond the towers of the town.  Each of these gardens held a villa in it, but all the near landscape below me was drowned in foliage.  A wonderful warm light of approaching sunset modelled the shadows and set the broad summits of the trees in a rich glow.  There was an absolute silence below and around me; a magic of suspense seemed to keep every topmost twig from waving.

Over my soul there swept an immense wave of emotion.  Now, surely, now the great final change must be approaching.  I gazed up into the tenderly-coloured sky, and I broke irresistibly into speech.  ‘Come now, Lord Jesus,’ I cried, ’come now and take me to be for ever with Thee in Thy Paradise.  I am ready to come.  My heart is purged from sin, there is nothing that keeps me rooted to this wicked world.  Oh, come now, now, and take me before I have known the temptations of life, before I have to go to London and all the dreadful things that happen there!’ And I raised myself on the sofa, and leaned upon the window-sill, and waited for the glorious apparition.