revelation he found in Plato removed him farther from boyhood. He fell in love
with gray Gothic churches, painted glass, organ lofts, etc.
Walter Pater has described phases of ferment, perhaps largely his own, in the
character of Florian Deleal; his rapture of the red hawthorn blossoms,
"absolutely the reddest of all things"; his times of "seemingly exclusive
predominance of interest in beautiful physical things, a kind of tyranny of the
senses"; and his later absorbing efforts to estimate the proportion of the sensuous
and ideal, assigning most importance to sensible vehicles and occasions;
associating all thoughts with touch and sight as a link between himself and
things, till he became more and more "unable to care for or think of soul but as
in an actual body"; comforted in the contemplation of death by the thought of
flesh turning to violets and almost oppressed by the pressure of the sensible
world, his longings for beauty intensifying his fear of death. He loved to gaze on
dead faces in the Paris Morgue although the haunt of them made the sunshine
sickly for days, and his long fancy that they had not really gone nor were quite
motionless, but led a secret, half fugitive life, freer by night, and perhaps
dodging about in their old haunts with no great good-will toward the living,
made him by turns pity and hate the ghosts who came back in the wind, beating
at the doors. His religious nature gradually yielded to a mystical belief in Bible
personages in some indefinite place as the reflexes and patterns of our nobler
self, whose companionship made the world more satisfying. There was "a
constant substitution of the typical for the actual," and angels might be met
anywhere. "A deep mysticity brooded over real things and partings," marriages
and many acts and accidents of life. "The very colors of things became
themselves weighty with meanings," or "full of penitence and peace." "For a
time he walked through the world in a sustained, not unpleasurable awe
generated by the habitual recognition, beside every circumstance and event of
life, of its celestial correspondent."
In D. C. Boulger's Life of General Charles Gordon[37] he records how, like
Nelson Clive, his hero was prone to boys' escapades and outbreaks that often
made him the terror of his superiors. He was no bookworm, but famous as the
possessor of high spirits, very often involved in affairs that necessitated
discipline, and seemed greatly out of harmony with the popular idea of the
ascetic of Mount Carmel. As a schoolboy he made wonderful squirts "that would
wet you through in a minute." One Sunday twenty-seven panes of glass in a
large storehouse were broken with screws shot through them by his cross-bow
"for ventilation." Ringing bells and pushing young boys in, butting an unpopular