The Silent Isle by A.C. Benson

It was a pleasant, fresh autumn day, and the philosopher was in a good temper. He was my walking companion for that afternoon. He is always in a good temper, for the matter of that, but his temper has different kinds of goodness. He is always courteous and amiable; but sometimes he has a gentle irony about him and evades all attempts to be serious to-day, however, he was both benevolent and expansive; and I plunged into his vast mind like a diver leaping headlong from a splash-board.

Let me describe my philosopher first. He is not what is called a social philosopher, a pretentious hedonist, who talks continuously and floridly about himself. I know one such, of whom an enthusiastic maiden said, in a confidential moment, that he seemed to her exactly like Goethe without any of his horrid immorality. Neither is he a technical philosopher, a dreary, hurrying man, travel-stained by faring through the ultimate, spectacled, cadaverous, uncertain of movement, inarticulate of speech. No, my philosopher is a trim, well-brushed man of the world, rather scrupulous about social conventions, as vigorous as Mr. Greatheart, and with a tenderness for the feebler sort of pilgrims.