while she looked over my shoulder down on to the volume on my knee and uttered an exclamation of surprise when her eye fell on nothing but black letters on a damp spotted yellow page. “‘Treating of the four complexions, into which men are bound during their sojourn in their earthly houses,’” she read aloud; “what does it mean? Let me look on. ‘Of those that draw their complexion from the dark and melancholy earth. Of those who take their complexion from the friendly air. Of those who are complexioned after the manner of fire. Of those who partake of the nature of the subtle and yielding water;’ who writes this queer stuff; is it sense or nonsense?” I held up the book that she might read the faded gilt letters on its wormeaten leather back. p. 85“Letters of Jacob Böhme to John Schauffman and others,” she read. “Oh!”—rather a doubtful “oh!” it was, as if the name did not settle the question about sense or nonsense as completely as she had expected it would.

p. 85

“This is rather a rare book I flatter myself,” I went on. “I bought it at a book-stall because it looked so odd and old, and found to my great joy that it was a miscellaneous collection of Jacob Böhme’s letters, on all sorts of subjects; the four that I have been reading this morning about the four different temperaments, or, as he calls it, complexions into which men may be divided, come in oddly enough among much more mystical and transcendental matter. They are, as I said, misty sketches of character, but I think they show that the dreamy old cobbler knew something about his fellow-men.”

K. “What are Jacob Böhme’s writings like?”

“Oh, I can’t tell you that, I can only tell you what it makes one feel like to read them. Something, as we should feel, you and I, if we climbed up to that peak above the wood there, and looked down on the mist in the valley now the sun is gilding it. We should have a vague feeling of having got up on to a height, and perceived something glorious; but we should not be able to give much account of what we had seen when we came down.”

K. “But I hope you will be able to give me an account of what you have been reading to-day. I want you to explain to me about the four complexions as we walk home.”

“Well, I will try; these four letters have something in them that one can get hold of and venture to put into fresh words. You must remember, to begin with, that Böhme still held to there being only four elements—earth, air, fire, and water—and thought that everything, our p. 86bodies included, 

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