Spirit, however, cannot fly from matter without material wings; the most abstract art is compacted of images, the most mystical renunciation obeys some passion of the heart. Images and passion, even if they are not easily recognizable in these Soliloquies as now coldly written down, were not absent from them when inwardly spoken. The images were English images, the passion was the love of England and, behind England, of Greece. What I love in Greece and in England is contentment in finitude, fair outward ways, manly perfection and simplicity. Admiration for England, of a certain sort, was instilled into me in my youth. My father (who read the language with ease although he did not speak it) had a profound respect for British polity and British power. In this admiration there was no touch of sentiment nor even of sympathy; behind it lay something like an ulterior contempt, such as we feel for the strong man exhibiting at a fair. The performance may be astonishing but the achievement is mean. So in the middle of the nineteenth century an intelligent foreigner, the native of a country materially impoverished, could look to England for a model of that irresistible energy and public discipline which afterwards were even more conspicuous in Bismarckian Germany and in the United States. It was admiration for material progress, for wealth, for the inimitable gift of success; and it was not free, perhaps, from the poor man's illusion, who jealously sets his heart on prosperity, and lets it blind him to the subtler sources of greatness. We should none of us admire England to-day, if we had to admire it only for its conquering commerce, its pompous noblemen, or its parliamentary government. I feel no great reverence even for the British Navy, which may be in the junk-shop to-morrow; but I heartily like the British sailor, with his clear-cut and dogged way of facing the world. It is health, not policy nor wilfulness, that gives true strength in the moral world, as in the animal kingdom; nature and fortune in the end are on the side of health. There is, or was, a beautifully healthy England hidden from most foreigners; the England of the countryside and of the poets, domestic, sporting, gallant, boyish, of a sure and delicate heart, which it has been mine to feel beating, though not so early in my life as I could have wished. In childhood I saw only Cardiff on a Sunday, and the docks of Liverpool; but books and prints soon opened to me more important vistas. I read the poets; and although British painting, when it tries to idealize human subjects, has always made me laugh, I was quick to discern an ethereal beauty in the landscapes of Turner. Furgueson's _Cathedrals of England_, too, and the great mansions in the Italian style depicted in the eighth edition of the _Encyclopaedia Britannica_, revealed to me even when a boy the rare charm that can envelop the most conventional things when they are associated with tender thoughts or with noble ways of living.