Page:Ploughshare and Pruning-Hook.djvu/32

12 saint was a greed for mortification; and he died very literally of blood-poisoning, brought about by his own suicidal act, because he willed too possessively to share the passion and sufferings of Christ—the death instead of the life.

That blood-poisoning of the mediæval saint's was a reaction, violent and unkind, against the wrongful version of possession which, in their day as in our own, was destroying the peaceful possibilities of human society.

Yet without a certain quality of possessiveness the human mind cannot grow. Wordsworth pictures for us very beautifully that natural possessive element in its age of innocence.

With these mental possessions he is opening his mind to the coming conquests of life: as much to be conquered by its beauty as to conquer it. But what he gains from his appreciation of earth's loveliness brings loss to none;