more pieces of silver he will be able to buy a house and settle down as a man of property. There is a democratic impulse in Heidenstam's philosophy of pleasure, a belief that a true symposium begets fraternity:
Sharing the loaf and the goat-skin flask, we are sitting together,
In the convivial air sprouts the seed from which may in secret
Grow the all-brothering hour
The idea has been followed, whether consciously or unconsciously, by the French poet Charles Vildrac in his piece "The Two Drinkers."
Most of the poems in Pilgrimages and Wanderyears are objective narratives, but the "Thoughts in Solitude" consist of short, personal lyrics in an introspective, often gloomy vein which Heidenstam has never ceased to cultivate. We find him in these "Thoughts" as an agnostic boldly searching for, as he puts it, the "spark" that "dwells deep within his soul." Some of these searchings will shock the orthodox, but they reveal with wonderful insight the depths of the poet's inmost nature. The ecclesiastical dogma of the atonement is repugnant to his manhood; he wishes to suffer in person for whatever wrong he has committed. He will not pray on his death-bed to a hypothetical god or to "deaf Nature,"
