第298页 / 共490页

The fuming censers that the grave boys, in their lace and

scarlet, tossed into the air like great gilt flowers had their

subtle fascination for him. As he passed out, he used to look

with wonder at the black confessionals and long to sit in the dim

shadow of one of them and listen to men and women whispering

through the worn grating the true story of their lives.

But he never fell into the error of arresting his intellectual

development by any formal acceptance of creed or system, or of

mistaking, for a house in which to live, an inn that is but

suitable for the sojourn of a night, or for a few hours of a

night in which there are no stars and the moon is in travail.

Mysticism, with its marvellous power of making common things

strange to us, and the subtle antinomianism that always seems to

accompany it, moved him for a season; and for a season he

inclined to the materialistic doctrines of the Darwinismus

movement in Germany, and found a curious pleasure in tracing the

thoughts and passions of men to some pearly cell in the brain, or

some white nerve in the body, delighting in the conception of the

absolute dependence of the spirit on certain physical conditions,

morbid or healthy, normal or diseased. Yet, as has been said of

him before, no theory of life seemed to him to be of any

importance compared with life itself.