Page:Poems of Nature and Life.djvu/74

 66 INTRODUCTION

destroy in his mind all inherited or traditional belief in that foundation of "miracles" on which the early Unitarianism v/as so artificially and elaborately built. How far Madam Craigie's negations extended, I never knew, though I sus- pect they were wide and deep ; but, if they went beyond the special doctrines of Christianity and included the thought-substructions of natural religion, they produced little or no effect on Randall's mind. The noble conclu- sion of "The Solitary Man," nay, the pervading religious spirit of all his poems from first to last, testifies to that essential powerlessness.

But, whatever was the precise content of Madam Craigie's philosophy, he always highly valued for her sake, and kept hanging above his fireplace to the end, a striking picture (he did not know the artist) which she had bequeathed to him as a memento of their friendship : the figure of a grim old gipsy woman, with half-averted face worthy of Meg Merrilies herself, warming her withered hands over a chafing-dish. Something in that picture connected itself in my boyish imagination, no doubt fantastically, with the weird impression I had got of the mental characteristics of Madam Craigie. Did she ap- point this uncanny and austere old queen-gipsy to be her representative in the home of her youthful friend till his hair grew white, out of some subtile but felt resemblance to herself in those powerful and not ignoble features, fixed there on the canvas in unchanging perpetuity } To this day I half believe it. The Sun gone — no heat or light save in a dimly smouldering handful of Charcoal — what an allegory !

One anecdote, told to me by Miss Randall not long after her brother's death, is indelible in my memory. She herself always retained the impressions of her early relig-

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