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And it seemed to Graham that nowhere, save only in a few poems, and in one or two passages of Plato, he could find the expression of a sentiment even approximating to that he felt for his friend. Many books he turned over, and such lines as caught his fancy he read again and again until he knew them by heart. Those portions of the Sonnets of Shakespeare which were least rhetorical, which appeared to spring from a genuine feeling, he learned in this way. Was not his friend, too, the ‘lord of his love,’ the ‘herald of the spring,’ the ‘lovely boy,’ the ‘rose of beauty,’ ‘music to hear’?—

And again:—

Nevertheless, it was in two poems by Rossetti, two poems of unsurpassable beauty, The Stream’s Secret and Love’s Nocturn, that he found, or thought he found, what he himself actually felt; their suggestion of a kind of impassioned mysticism appealing to him, being indeed but an echo of that curious vein of mysticism which from the first had entered into and made more wonderful his own love. These poems, altering the gender of the personal pronouns, and thinking of Harold while he said them, he repeated over and over to himself, until in the end they became in his mind so bound up with his friend that he could not have imagined them in any other connection, that he could not have heard them without seeing Harold’s face.

The spring passed quickly; summer was already here; and as Graham, fallen now completely into the ways of his new life, watched one day after another glide swiftly from him, sometimes he longed to stretch out his hand to stay this or that particular hour and keep it with him for ever.

On an afternoon in the beginning of July he had flung himself down in the shade, and was lying on his back among the long, sweet-smelling grass. He had been fielding out for more than an hour under a deep, cloudless sky, and he was a little tired and hot. His straw hat lay on the ground beside him, and he gazed up at the sky through the leafy branches of a tree that stretched above him like a gigantic parasol. The delicious summer heat, the stillness, made him feel rather drowsy; and he let his thoughts wander hither and thither on the wings of every idle fancy. Already the shouts from the cricketers reached him only as a far-off murmur, blended dreamily in his mind with the humming of a great black and yellow striped bee, which flitted noisily from cup to cup of a group of purple fox-gloves growing close at hand.

Days like this were very beautiful, he thought, and this old volcanic earth with its bright delicate covering, like a carpet, of grass and trees and flowers. And life!—yes; and life itself was beautiful! For the same life that was moving joyously within his young warm blood, was moving in the sap of tree and grass. What was it all? Whence did it spring? Every day a miracle was wrought when some delicate leaf, or the spiral of a new-born fern, unfolded itself in the soft air, or pushed up through the dark clinging soil. And this was life! And he was alive! He found an exquisite happiness in the thought that he himself was thus a part of nature, so close to nature in her simpler forms. It was as if—always alive to the charm of such things—he understood now for the first time the full meaning of the old Greek ‘tree-worship,’ realised, as it were, its origin, in his own emotions. That faculty for noting the listening soul, the spirit that is in leaf or plant, seemed to be a part of his very human nature, seemed as some ancient bond of relationship that bound him then, and would bind him for ever, to stiller and less perfect forms of life—to a whole world of pastoral divinities—the great god Pan himself; the Hamadryads, who inhabit the forest trees; and Oreads, and Naiads, and Hyades—the deities of water-springs, and streams, and showers of summer rain.

As he thought of it a wave of joy seemed to raise him up suddenly on its strong, full flood; a deep happiness that had come to him often before in his solitude, and which, for the time at any rate, was sufficient. To live! to live! to live! it seemed to cry—that was enough; there was nothing else in the world. Ah, surely he must be happy so long as the sun shone and all nature sang with that great rhythmic chaunt of sensuous life! He closed his eyes that the exquisitely fresh and living smell of the earth, his mother, the cool sweet green smell of the swaying grass, might creep into his very being. How delicious it was just to lie there in the lush green grass, among the clear, floating shadows—to lie and think his thoughts as they drifted into his mind from the outer sunshine.

When he chose to look in their direction, he could see his schoolfellows eager still over their game of cricket; but he was content to watch them, content to look on, lazily, dreamily, through his half-closed eyelids, following every now and then the swift curving passage of the ball through the air, when it rose above the fielders’ heads.

And in everything, though in a somewhat misty fashion, he seemed to feel the personality, the influence, of Harold Brocklehurst. Was it not all—his extraordinarily vivid sense of life—bound up in some subtle way with the beauty of their friendship? Had not their friendship helped him to realise the mystery and loveliness of nature; helped him to make things out; helped to unseal his eyes? It was the force of a temperament that found expression very easily, which he felt to be working now upon his own simpler nature, his spirit, his mind,—altering everything around him, awakening a new beauty in familiar things, suggesting a wider, deeper, more mystical beauty where before he had only been conscious of a material impression. It carried with it, too, a hundred hints, memories, of a strangely familiar paganism, of a fresher, younger world; a hundred touches of poetry:—the sun, the climbing plant: Apollo, Dionysus:—strong, beautiful, swift. This boy!—what had he to do with them? Why should he suggest them? And then, in the background, a haunting sense of something darker, more fateful—tragic even!—again the legend of Dionysus; but more pitiable, quite human, vaguely pathetic and bewildering.

By and by he opened a copy of the Phaedrus, which he had worked through with his father, and began to read.

They had studied together most of the shorter dialogues, and the whole of the Republic, but the Phaedrus Graham cared for most. In its pages he had taken his first peep at philosophy—philosophy, as conceived by him, so near to, so replete with, poetry;—‘Really, Phaedrus, you make a most charming guide.’ Nay, it was poetry! deep, impassioned poetry! for with Plato, even the trees and streams, all the lovely things of the visible world, were made to play their parts. It was as if they possessed active and living souls. They had at least, the boy felt, a wonderful share in the development of one’s own soul: they seemed to breathe about it an atmosphere of light and purity and happiness. In Plato’s philosophy—so far as he understood it—there was little he could not accept. On one very hot, still day, for instance, a passing breath of wind on his face had suddenly awakened in him the recollection of a prior existence—faintly, vaguely, perhaps, but still quite clearly enough to stamp a definite impression on his mind.

And for him, of all writers, this old Greek had the most delightfully personal charm. As he read him, indeed, it seemed as if the peculiar beauty of his nature were exhaled gently from the printed pages—gently and very delicately—like, say, the faint perfume of a spray of sweet-briar he had dried a few days ago between them, and which now as he came suddenly upon it and held it to his lips, breathed still the ghostly shadow of its former fragrance. Surely no other books were so fair and sweet, so wise and true. In the charmed circle of their range, the coarser qualities of things were forgotten, the light was cleansed, the whole realm of the soul lay clear. He knew no other writings that flowed in with so gracious a charm upon one’s spirit, filling it with a love for all that is beautiful and good, watering its ‘wing-feathers’: no others that exercised so humanising an influence upon one’s character. For it was, in truth, before all else, a philosophy of life, of the highest life one may hope to lead here upon earth, or later on in heaven. A philosophy of love, too, necessarily!—and of beauty. Of all earthly things beauty approximated most nearly to its eternal idea: and love!—well, all desire for good and happiness, nay, even the working of philosophy itself—all that was only the gracious power of love. On these the path was builded, the Platonic ladder reaching from earth to heaven; for one climbed, after all, to those pure, colourless regions, to that radiant world of ideas, by Phaedo’s golden hair.

Well! such a doctrine met most of the needs of his own spirit, and awakened in him, naturally, a very friendly feeling for its author; the kind of affection we have for any one who has thought just the same thought, felt just the same joy or sorrow, that we are thinking and feeling now. As a young boy will linger long beside some deep pool of sea-water he finds among the rocks, peering down into its minute caverns and among its seaweeds for unknown curiosities and treasures, so Graham lingered over these pages, trying to learn all things from them, a rule of life for himself, a rule whereby he might, as far as was possible, enter into and judge the lives of others, might discover what to cling to, what to throw away. Over the dark still well of Life he leaned, and through that deep cool water, ruffled gently by the soft warm breath of youth, the face of Love himself arose, his hair streaming back like a flame, his sad grey eyes full of an infinite pity.

And he began to dream of an immortal love which, though unable to realise itself perfectly in this world, yet might be strong enough to draw two souls together, after death, in some far heaven. Far! But in truth it seemed quite near just now:—was here, a soft radiance, in his own spirit, in the warm air that blew about his face, in the sunlight, in the trees, in the voices of his playmates. Only afterwards—afterwards there would be that untroubled and perfect communion which hovered now before him as an unattainable ideal, a light behind the clouds, a flame on the horizon; ‘for then, and not till then, the soul will be parted from the body and exist in herself alone.’

Plato’s theories blew just like a cool wind upon the dust gathered in one’s mind. They entered one’s mind easily and at once, sinking down into the very depths of one’s spirit, to be a light there for ever, to sing there for ever, as the morning stars sang together.

And they were so bound up with ordinary existence, with the affairs of every day! They stretched out from their idealism a friendly hand to which he could cling when struggling along the rough muddy roads of the world. But above all, he was charmed with the theory of natural suggestion, the influence beautiful things have upon one in childhood and boyhood in the building-up and equipment of one’s character. The grouping of clouds about a sunset, the noise of running water—these, and other things like these, were working always, working delicately, upon one’s mind and temper, shading them, as it were, to fairer colours and softer outlines. For material beauty is at least one rung, though it be the lowest, in the Platonic ladder. Higher fair souls; fair virtues higher still; and highest of all the pure idea of Beauty itself, invisible to the eye of sense, but lying bright and clear before the vision of the mind, a glorious sight, to be viewed by those alone who have cleansed their souls of earthly passions:—‘Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.’

When he had finished the little introduction he closed the book and laid it upon the grass beside him. Nothing he had ever read, he thought, called up more vividly the impression, the very sound and smell of life out of doors. In each word was an exquisite suggestion of nature, of the open air, of the trees and green grass, and the cool shallow stream up which Socrates and Phaedrus had walked. The spirits that had haunted the bank under the plane-tree seemed now to haunt the pages of the dialogue. And indeed, as though magically changed, the elm above him had suddenly become a plane-tree. Nay! he could hear, actually hear, the trickle of the stream—could hear the chirping of the grasshoppers. And Phaedrus and Socrates!—yes, Phaedrus and Socrates were talking still: if he listened very intently he could make out the tones of their voices, even their words—if he closed his eyes he could see them.

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The sounds about him drew farther and farther away as though fading back into dreamland. A clear light, pale green, like a reflection from some deep pool, was in the sky. The whole world was changed, and he seemed to be wandering in a country of gentle streams and meadows, while the green grass was gay with yellow daffodils.

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The sunlight slanted lower, falling on the upper windows of the school. Was his dream less real than that soft light, he wondered? Did not both come from somewhere in the clouds? It explained so much; it pushed back, as it were, the horizon. Plato had believed in it. Could it be, then, that there were certain persons—like Plato, like himself—who were actually nearer to the unseen than others were? Surely things came to him, with the scent of flowers, with the sighing of wind, with the splash of the sea! There was a spirit which breathed upon him from the rustling trees and from the grass under his feet.

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