At last, in the very depth of his misery, he was sought out
and rescued by the editor of the paper to whom he had sent _Health and
Holiness_ and some of his poems. This saved him, his work brought him
good friends, and he was enabled to write his wonderful poetry. These
terrible experiences, which would have quenched the faith of the
ordinary man and led him to despair, with the poet mystic sought
expression in those six triumphant verses found among his papers when he
died,[82] verses charged with mystic passion, which assert the solid
reality of spiritual things, and tell us that to the outcast and the
wanderer every place was holy ground, Charing Cross was the gate of
heaven, and that he beheld--
Christ walking on the water
Not of Gennesareth, but Thames!
Through all that he writes there breathes the spirit of mystic devotion
and aspiration, but the following characteristics and beliefs may be
specially noted.
(1) His reverence of childhood. He sees in the child something of the
divinity which Vaughan and Wordsworth saw, and his poems to children,
such as _Daisy_ and _The Poppy_, have a special quality of passionate
worship all their own.
(2) His attitude towards the beauty of woman.
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