In _The Blue Peaks_ he sings of the Quest of the beckoning dim blue hills, of which he wrote again many years later in _The Divine Adventure_. And the third, “The River το καλυγ,” is an ecstatic chant to Beauty:
O Spirit fair Who dwelleth where The heart of Beauty is enshrined.
Wherewith he invokes “Nature, or Beauty, or God” to help him to realise the poignant dream of beauty, which haunted him in diverse ways throughout his life. When he sent them to me he realised how youthful and faulty was the presentment, and he wrote: “If I had not promised to send these poems I should certainly not do so now. They are very poor every way, and the only interest they may have for you is to show you the former current of my thoughts—I did indeed put Beauty in the place of God, and Nature in that of his Laws. Now that I see more clearly (and that is not saying much), these appear trash. Still there is some good here and there. I am glad I have written them, for they helped me to arrive at clearer convictions. The verse and rhythm are purposely uneven and irregular—it admitted of easier composition to write so.” While at the University he had made an eager study of comparative religions, their ethics and metaphysics, being then in active revolt against the religious teachings in which he had been brought up. This mental conflict, this weighing of metaphysical problems, found expression in the first Book of a projected Epic on Man, to be called _Upland, Woodland, Cloudland_. “Amid the Uplands” only was finished, and consists of two thousand lines in blank verse; the leading idea is fairly suggested in these lines from the Proem:
“And I have written in the love of God And in a sense of man’s proud destiny.
And I have striven to point out harmony, An inner harmony in all things fair, Flow’rs, tree, and cloudlet, wind, and ocean wave, Wold, hill, and forest, with the heart of man, And with the firmament and universe, And thence with God. All things are part of Him.”
Scattered through the many pages of philosophic exhortation and speculation, of descriptions of nature, of psychical visions, are lines that are suggestive of later development, of later trend of thought, and from them the following are selected: