There, again, the complete reasonableness and sincerity of his poetry is put to the test of his prose. It is as if another and most essential witness vouched for the wisdom of "The Hound of Heaven"--a witness who, after focussing the different vision of a different art upon the same experience, swore to the same truth. He continues:--
"Yet higher, yet further let us go. Is this daughter of God mortal? can her foot not pass the grave? Is Nature, as men tell us,
. . . a fold Of Heaven and earth across His Face,
which we must rend to behold that Face? Do our eyes indeed close for ever on the beauty of earth when they open on the beauty of Heaven? I think not so; I would fain beguile even death itself with a sweet fantasy. . . . I believe that in Heaven is earth. Plato's doctrine of Ideals, as I conceive, laid its hand upon the very breast of truth, yet missed her breathing. For beauty--such is my faith--is beauty for eternity."
The faith of "In Heaven is Earth" is but a tentative expression of his later gospel. At first he had been alarmed at the theory--in the form in which it had reached him--of the survival of earthly love in Heaven. He had not then read Patmore or Swedenborg. Even the tentative belief is timidly qualified:--
"Earthly beauty is but heavenly beauty taking to itself flesh. . . . Within the Spirit Who is Heaven lies Earth; for within Him rests the great conception of Creation. . . .
Yet there the soul shall enter which hath earned That privilege by virtue. . . .
As one man is more able than his fellows to enter into another's mind, so in proportion as each of us by virtue has become kin to God, will he penetrate the Supreme Spirit, and identify himself with the Divine Ideals. There is the immortal Sicily, there the Elysian Fields, there all visions, all fairness engirdled with the Eternal Fair. This, my faith, is laid up in my bosom."
His belief here lies close to Swedenborg, whose _Conjugial Love_ F. T. borrowed from my shelves with an eagerness evinced for no other book there.
At every turn he is the devoted, intentest, faithfullest interpreter of the material world. All his "copy" awaited him in nature; his translations from her tangible writings bear on every page the _imprimatur_ of his faith. The generality of the revelation made to them did not spoil his appetite nor blur his surprising genius for detail.