A Great Man - Page 2

the solid earth was every instant failing under my feet.
In a little while that splendid sunlight showed only in splashes,
like flaming stars and suns in the dome of green sky.
Around me in that emerald twilight were trunks of trees of every
plain or twisted type; it was like a chapel supported on columns
of every earthly and unearthly style of architecture.

Without intention my mind grew full of fancies on the nature
of the forest; on the whole philosophy of mystery and force.
For the meaning of woods is the combination of energy with complexity.
A forest is not in the least rude or barbarous; it is only dense
with delicacy. Unique shapes that an artist would copy or a
philosopher watch for years if he found them in an open plain are
here mingled and confounded; but it is not a darkness of deformity.
It is a darkness of life; a darkness of perfection. And I began
to think how much of the highest human obscurity is like this,
and how much men have misunderstood it. People will tell you,
for instance, that theology became elaborate because it was dead.
Believe me, if it had been dead it would never have become elaborate;
it is only the live tree that grows too many branches.

. . . . .

These trees thinned and fell away from each other, and I came out
into deep grass and a road. I remember being surprised that the
evening was so far advanced; I had a fancy that this valley had a
sunset all to itself. I went along that road according to directions
that had been given me, and passed the gateway in a slight paling
beyond which the wood changed only faintly to a garden.
It was as if the curious courtesy and fineness of that character
I was to meet went out from him upon the valley; for I felt
on all these things the finger of that quality which the old
English called "faërie"; it is the quality which those can
never understand who think of the past as merely brutal;
it is an ancient elegance such as there is in trees.
I went through the garden and saw an old man sitting by a table,
looking smallish in his big chair. He was already an invalid,
and his hair and beard were both white; not like snow, for snow
is cold and heavy, but like something feathery, or even fierce;
rather they were white like the white thistledown. I came up
quite close to him; he looked at me as he put out his frail hand,
and I saw of a sudden that his eyes were startlingly young.
He was the one great man of the old world whom I have met
who was not a mere statue over his own grave.

He was deaf and he talked like a torrent. He did not talk about
the books he had written; he was far too much alive for that.
He talked about the books he had not written. He unrolled
a purple bundle of