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He found himself in a small square; he sat down on a bench; his brain burning, his eyes unseeing.

“Oh! my, what’s he piping over?” jeered a grotesque voice, and a small figure disappeared, turning somersaults among the bushes.

“Poor young man! Perhaps he is ill. Are you not well, sir?” asked a sympathetic nurse.

He started up, brought to himself, and muttering something unintelligible, continued his journey through the city. The terrible influence departed, and a new change came over him. The laugh of the urchin rankled in his mind: he hated notice: there must be something absurd or out of the common in his appearance to invoke it. He knew suddenly that there was a gulf between him and the people he lived among. They were vivid, actual, suited to their places. How he envied them! Then the whole superficies of his mind became filled with a desire to conceal this difference. He recalled the various characteristics of those who worked along with him. One knew all topical songs, slang and phrases; another affected a smartness in dress; a third discussed theatres with semi-professional knowledge. Harvey, however, could never have entered the world, or lived in it, if he had first to pass through the portals of such ideas! He delivered his letter; he was wearied out, and as he returned he noticed neither sky nor sunlight, and the hurrying multitudes were indifferent and without character. He passed through them; his mind dull like theirs; a mere machine to guide rapid footsteps.

That evening, a clerk named Whittaker, a little his senior in the office, was struck by Harvey’s curious and delicate face.

“I say, Harvey,” he said, “how do you spend your evenings?”

Harvey flushed a little at the unwonted interest.

“I take long walks,” he said.

“Do you read much?”

“A little.”

“Do you go to the theatre?”

“No.”

“Never?”

“Never.”

“Whew! what a queer fellow! No clubs, classes, music-halls– anything of the sort, eh?”

“No,” said Harvey, a little bitterly, “I know nothing, nobody; I am always alone.”

“What an extraordinary life! Why, you are out of the universe completely. I say,” he added, “come along with me this evening. I will initiate you a little. You know you must learn your profession as a human being.”

His manner was very kindly; still Harvey was so shy that he would have found some excuse, but for that chance expression, “out of the universe.” Was not this apartness the very thing he had just been bitterly feeling? While he hesitated and stammered in his awkwardness, the other said: “There, no excuses! You need not go to your lodgings for tea. Come along with me.”

They went off together through the darkening streets. One cheerful and irreverent, brimful of remark or criticism; the other silent, his usual dreaminess was modified, but had not departed, and once, gazing up through the clear, dark blue, where the stars were shining, he had a momentary sense as if he were suspended from them by a fine invisible thread, as a spider hung from her roof; suspended from on high, where the pure and ancient aether flamed around the habituations of eternity; and below and about him, the thoughts of demons, the smoke, darkness, horror and anguish of the pit.

Chapter II.

I Cannot tell all the steps by which the young soul came forth from its clouds and dreams, but must hurry over the years. This single incident of his boyhood I have told to mark the character and tendency of his development; spirituality made self-conscious only in departing; life, a falling from ideals which grew greater, more beautiful and luminous as the possibility of realizing them died away. But this ebbtide of inner life was not regular and incessant, but rather after the fashion of waves which retreat surely indeed, but returning again and again, seem for moments to regain almost more than their past altitude. His life was a series of such falls and such awakenings. Every new experience which drew his soul from its quietude brought with it a revelation of a spiritual past, in which, as it now seemed, he had been living unconsciously. Every new experience which enriched his mind seemed to leave his soul more barren. The pathetic anguish of these moments had little of the moral element, which was dormant and uncultivated rather than perverted. He did not ponder over their moral aspect, for he shared the superficial dislike to the ethical, which we often see in purely artistic natures, who cannot endure the entrance of restraint or pain upon their beauty. His greatest lack was the companionship of fine men or noble women. He had shot up far beyond the reach of those whom he knew, and wanting this companionship he grew into a cynical or sensuous way of regarding them. He began to write: he had acquired the faculty of vigourous expression by means of such emotions as were tinged with a mystical voluptuousness which was the other pole to his inner, secret and spiritual being. The double strain upon his energies, which daily work and nightly study with mental productiveness involved, acted injuriously upon his health, and after a year he became so delicate that he could carry on neither one nor other of his avocations without an interval of complete rest. Obtaining leave from his employers, he went back for a period of six weeks to the village where he had been born. Here in the early summer and sunshine his health rapidly improved; his mind even more than his body drank deep draughts of life; and here, more than at any period in his life, did his imagination begin to deal with mighty things, and probe into the secret mysteries of life, and here passed into the long descended line by which the human spirit passed from empire; he began to comprehend dimly by what decadence from starry state the soul of man is ushered into the great visible life. These things came to him not clearly as ideas, but rather as shadowy and shining vision thrown across the air of dawn of twilight as he moved about.