It was as if there were not one only, but two wayfarers, side by side, visible there across the plain, as he indulged his fancy.

A bird came and sang among the wattled hedge-roses: an animal feeding crept nearer: the child who kept it was gazing quietly: and the scene and the hours still conspiring, he passed from that mere fantasy of a self not himself, beside him in his coming and [68] going, to those divinations of a living and companionable spirit at work in all things, of which he had become aware from time to time in his old philosophic readings--in Plato and others, last but not least, in Aurelius.

Through one reflection upon another, he passed from such instinctive divinations, to the thoughts which give them logical consistency, formulating at last, as the necessary exponent of our own and the world's life, that reasonable Ideal to which the Old Testament gives the name of Creator, which for the philosophers of Greece is the Eternal Reason, and in the New Testament the Father of Men--even as one builds up from act and word and expression of the friend actually visible at one's side, an ideal of the spirit within him.
In this peculiar and privileged hour, his bodily frame, as he could recognise, although just then, in the whole sum of its capacities, so entirely possessed by him--Nay! actually his very self--was yet determined by a far-reaching system of material forces external to it, a thousand combining currents from earth and sky.

Its seemingly active powers of apprehension were, in fact, but susceptibilities to influence.

The perfection of its capacity might be said to depend on its passive surrender, as of a leaf on the wind, to the motions of the great stream of physical energy without it.