looked, and it was a young man with a beautiful and rather severe face, whom I knew to be an angel, who was gazing at me rather strangely.  I thought it was the messenger of death, and—­for I was wishing to be gone and have done with it all—­I said something to him about being ready to depart—­and then added that I was waiting hopefully to see the joys of Paradise, the glory of the saints in light.  He looked at me rather fixedly, and said, “I do not know why you should say that, and why you should expect to take so much pleasure in the beauty of heaven, when you have taken so little trouble to see anything of the beauty of earth;” and then he left me; and I reflected that I had always been doing my work in a dull humdrum way, in the same place all my life; and I determined that, if I got well, I would go about and see something of the glory that is revealed to us, and not expect only the glory that shall be revealed to us.’  It is a fine story,” he went on, “and makes a parable for us writers, who are inclined to think too much about our work, and disposed to see that it is very good, like God brooding over the world.”  He sate for a little, smiling to himself.  And then I plied him with questions about his writing, how his thoughts came to him how he worked them out.  He told me as if he was talking about some one else, half wondering that there could be anything to care about.  I have heard many craftsmen talk about their work, but never one who talked with such detachment.  As a rule, writers talk with a secret glee, and with a deprecating humility that deceives no one; but the great man talked, not as if he cared to think about it, but because it happened to interest me.  He strolled with me, he lunched; and he thanked us when he went away with an earnest and humble thankfulness, as though we had extended our hospitality to an obscure and unworthy guest.  And then his praise of my own books—­it was all so natural; not as if he had come there with fine compliments prepared, with incense to burn; but speaking about them as though they were in his mind, and he could not help it.  “I read all you write,” he said; “ah, you go deep—­you are a lucky fellow, to be able to see so far and so minutely, and to bring it all home to our blind souls.  He must be a terrible fellow to live with,” he said, smiling at my wife.  “It must be like being married to a doctor, and feeling that he knows so much more about one than one knows oneself—­but he sees what is best and truest, thank God; and says it with the voice of an angel, speaking softly out of his golden cloud.”

I can’t say what words like these have meant to me; but the visit itself, the sight of this strong, equable, good-humoured man, with no feverish ambitions, no hankering after fame or recognition, has done even more.  I have heard it said that he is indolent, that he has not sufficient sense of responsibility for his gifts.  But the man has done a great work for his generation; he has written poetry of the purest