would not put a coat of mail upon a young and eager heart; who did not tremble when he beheld the constellations of the moral heaven grow pale, fall from their place, and die, nor when his Heraclitean fancy saw the wheel of the universe revolving ever on the same axis, returning ever to the same points at the same times? A man who was content with little bread, who scarcely knew the love of woman, who lived poor, wandering, a stranger ever, who had no friends of his own stature, who was half understood, who dragged his suffering body and his acid thought into the lowliest inns and the broadest solitudes of Alpine and Mediterranean Europe, and yet refused to draw back, to stop, to wear a mask or win ignoble comfort—a man who, with a manly soul full of pride, of poetry, and of grief, built up his moral personality hour by hour even to the expected day of his spiritual death—such a man, I say, whatever bigots or hagiographers or fools may call him, is a saint.
His was the love of a secret ideal, of another world, cleaner, free-aired, whereof his thoughts, solidified in fragments or in poems, give us but glimpses. How different this passion from the physical breathlessness that drove him from the mountains to the sea, his brain wounded as by the point of a compass—thought—which never found its centre, his princely heart loving madly,
