Page:Studies in Letters and Life (Woodberry, 1890).djvu/233

Rh that insight into spiritual things which would naturally be looked for from real genius occupied with such subjects. Spirituality should have been his trait if religion was his life, but, in fact, these letters are in this regard barren. The anomalous nature of his poetic—life the fact that he used his powers, not to express his deepest emotions, but to escape from them—may be pleaded in extenuation of what seems at first a surprising defect; but a more likely explanation lies in another direction. It was sermons that he read, theology that he talked about, a theory of grace and salvation that he meditated upon in secret; his religion occupied his thoughts rather than his acts, touched his future rather than his present,—in a word,, it was a system rather than a life, the source of doubt instead of inspiration. To put it in the simplest form, he derived his light, not from his own inner experience, but from the creed. In his case the light was the darkness of insanity; but his own conviction in the matter is shown in his characterization of Beattie,—"a man whose faculties have now and then a glimpse from Heaven upon them, a man not indeed in possession of much evangelical light, but