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It was rumoured of him once that he was about to join the Roman

Catholic communion, and certainly the Roman ritual had always a

great attraction for him. The daily sacrifice, more awful really

than all the sacrifices of the antique world, stirred him as much

by its superb rejection of the evidence of the senses as by the

primitive simplicity of its elements and the eternal pathos of

the human tragedy that it sought to symbolize. He loved to kneel

down on the cold marble pavement and watch the priest, in his

stiff flowered dalmatic, slowly and with white hands moving aside

the veil of the tabernacle, or raising aloft the jewelled,

lantern-shaped monstrance with that pallid wafer that at times,

one would fain think, is indeed the "panis caelestis," the bread

of angels, or, robed in the garments of the Passion of Christ,

breaking the Host into the chalice and smiting his breast for his

sins.