122 MY LIFE [Chap. 



" We yearn for brotherhood with lake and mountain ; 



Our conscious soul seeks conscious sympathy, 

 Nymphs in the coppice, Naiads in the fountain, 



Gods in the craggy heights and roaring sea. 

 We find but soulless sequences of matter, 



Fact linked to fact by adamantine rods, 

 Eternal bonds of former sense and latter, 



Blind laws for living gods. 



" They care not any whit for pain or pleasure 

 That seem to men the sum and end of all ; 



Dumb force and barren number are their measure ; 

 What can be, shall be, though the great world fall. 



They take no heed of man or man's deserving, 

 Reck not what happy lives they make or mar, 



Work out their fatal will unswerv'd unswerving, 



And know not that they are ! " 



The poem consists of twenty-one verses, every one of 

 them perfect in rhyme and rhythm, and each carrying on the 

 argument and illustration to the conclusion. This gifted 

 writer would have been a great naturalist, and perhaps also 

 a great poet, had he not been obliged to write novels and 

 magazine articles for a livelihood. 



Another interesting character was Mrs. Beecher Hooker, 

 sister to Henry Ward Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe. 

 She was a fine lecturer on social, ethical, and spiritual subjects, 

 and was also a spiritualist and trance speaker, well known 

 throughout America. One evening she gave a reception, to 

 which she invited her friends to meet me. Many of the 

 clergy and a large number of the senators and congressmen, 

 with their wives and daughters, were present, and she would 

 insist on introducing me to a number of them, so that I had 

 to shake hands with fifty or sixty people. They seemed 

 quite puzzled. I heard one say to another, " I guess he's 

 some Western man, but I never heard of him." " No," said 

 his friend; "he's an Englishman, lecturing on biology and 

 Darwin, and such things." " Wal," said the first, " he hasn't 

 much of the English accent." Mrs. Hooker was very anxious 

 that we should come to live in America (she had visited us 

 in England) and form a kind of home colony, being sure that 



