YEAST : A PROBLEM  PREFACE TO THE FOURTH EDITION  This book was written nearly twelve years ago ; and so many things have changed since then , that it is hardly fair to send it into the world afresh , without some notice of the improvement — if such there be — which has taken place meanwhile in those southern counties of England , with which alone this book deals .  I believe that things are improved .  Twelve years more of the new Poor Law have taught the labouring men greater self-help and independence ; I hope that those virtues may not be destroyed in them once more , by the boundless and indiscriminate almsgiving which has become the fashion of the day , in most parishes where there are resident gentry .  If half the money which is now given away in different forms to the agricultural poor could be spent in making their dwellings fit for honest men to live in , then life , morals , and poor-rates , would be saved to an immense amount .  But as I do not see how to carry out such a plan , I have no right to complain of others for not seeing .  Meanwhile cottage improvement , and sanitary reform , throughout the country districts , are going on at a fearfully slow rate .  Here and there high-hearted landlords , like the Duke of Bedford , are doing their duty like men ; but in general , the apathy of the educated classes is most disgraceful .  But the labourers , during the last ten years , are altogether better off .  Free trade has increased their food , without lessening their employment .  The politician who wishes to know the effect on agricultural life of that wise and just measure , may find it in Mr. Grey of Dilston’s answers to the queries of the French Government .  The country parson will not need to seek so far .  He will see it ( if he be an observant man ) in the faces and figures of his school-children .  He will see a rosier , fatter , bigger-boned race growing up , which bids fair to surpass in bulk the puny and ill-fed generation of 1815-45 , and equal , perhaps , in thew and sinew , to the men who saved Europe in the old French war .  If it should be so ( as God grant it may ) , there is little fear but that the labouring men of England will find their aristocracy able to lead them in the battle-field , and to develop the agriculture of the land at home , even better than did their grandfathers of the old war time .  To a thoughtful man , no point of the social horizon is more full of light , than the altered temper of the young gentlemen .  They have their faults and follies still — for when will young blood be other than hot blood ?  But when one finds , more and more , swearing banished from the hunting-field , foul songs from the universities , drunkenness and gambling from the barracks ; when one finds everywhere , whether at college , in camp , or by the cover-side , more and more , young men desirous to learn their duty as Englishmen , and if possible to do it ; when one hears their altered tone toward the middle classes , and that word ‘snob’ ( thanks very much to Mr. Thackeray ) used by them in its true sense , without regard of rank ; when one watches , as at Aldershott , the care and kindness of officers toward their men ; and over and above all this , when one finds in every profession ( in that of the soldier as much as any ) young men who are not only ‘in the world , ’ but ( in religious phraseology ) ‘of the world , ’ living God-fearing , virtuous , and useful lives , as Christian men should : then indeed one looks forward with hope and confidence to the day when these men shall settle down in life , and become , as holders of the land , the leaders of agricultural progress , and the guides and guardians of the labouring man .  I am bound to speak of the farmer , as I know him in the South of England .  In the North he is a man of altogether higher education and breeding : but he is , even in the South , a much better man than it is the fashion to believe him .  No doubt , he has given heavy cause of complaint .  He was demoralised , as surely , if not as deeply , as his own labourers , by the old Poor Law .  He was bewildered — to use the mildest term — by promises of Protection from men who knew better .  But his worst fault after all has been , that young or old , he has copied his landlord too closely , and acted on his maxims and example .  And now that his landlord is growing wiser , he is growing wiser too .  Experience of the new Poor Law , and experience of Free-trade , are helping him to show himself what he always was at heart , an honest Englishman .  All his brave persistence and industry , his sturdy independence and self-help , and last , but not least , his strong sense of justice , and his vast good-nature , are coming out more and more , and working better and better upon the land and the labourer ; while among his sons I see many growing up brave , manly , prudent young men , with a steadily increasing knowledge of what is required of them , both as manufacturers of food , and employers of human labour .  The country clergy , again , are steadily improving .  I do not mean merely in morality — for public opinion now demands that as a sine quà non — but in actual efficiency .  Every fresh appointment seems to me , on the whole , a better one than the last .  They are gaining more and more the love and respect of their flocks ; they are becoming more and more centres of civilisation and morality to their parishes ; they are working , for the most part , very hard , each in his own way ; indeed their great danger is , that they should trust too much in that outward ‘business’ work which they do so heartily ; that they should fancy that the administration of schools and charities is their chief business , and literally leave the Word of God to serve tables .  Would that we clergymen could learn ( some of us are learning already ) that influence over our people is not to be gained by perpetual interference in their private affairs , too often inquisitorial , irritating , and degrading to both parties , but by showing ourselves their personal friends , of like passions with them .  Let a priest do that .  Let us make our people feel that we speak to them , and feel to them , as men to men , and then the more cottages we enter the better .  If we go into our neighbours’ houses only as judges , inquisitors , or at best gossips , we are best — as too many are — at home in our studies .  Would , too , that we would recollect this — that our duty is , among other things , to preach the Gospel ; and consider firstly whether what we commonly preach be any Gospel or good news at all , and not rather the worst possible news ; and secondly , whether we preach at all ; whether our sermons are not utterly unintelligible ( being delivered in an unknown tongue ) , and also of a dulness not to be surpassed ; and whether , therefore , it might not be worth our while to spend a little time in studying the English tongue , and the art of touching human hearts and minds .  But to return : this improved tone ( if the truth must be told ) is owing , far more than people themselves are aware , to the triumphs of those liberal principles , for which the Whigs have fought for the last forty years , and of that sounder natural philosophy of which they have been the consistent patrons .  England has become Whig ; and the death of the Whig party is the best proof of its victory .  It has ceased to exist , because it has done its work ; because its principles are accepted by its ancient enemies ; because the political economy and the physical science , which grew up under its patronage , are leavening the thoughts and acts of Anglican and of Evangelical alike , and supplying them with methods for carrying out their own schemes .  Lord Shaftesbury’s truly noble speech on Sanitary Reform at Liverpool is a striking proof of the extent to which the Evangelical leaders have given in their adherence to those scientific laws , the original preachers of which have been called by his Lordship’s party heretics and infidels , materialists and rationalists .  Be it so .  Provided truth be preached , what matter who preaches it ?  Provided the leaven of sound inductive science leaven the whole lump , what matter who sets it working ?  Better , perhaps , because more likely to produce practical success , that these novel truths should be instilled into the minds of the educated classes by men who share somewhat in their prejudices and superstitions , and doled out to them in such measure as will not terrify or disgust them .  The child will take its medicine from the nurse’s hand trustfully enough , when it would scream itself into convulsions at the sight of the doctor , and so do itself more harm than the medicine would do it good .  The doctor meanwhile ( unless he be one of Hesiod’s ‘fools , who know not how much more half is than the whole’ ) is content enough to see any part of his prescription got down , by any hands whatsoever .  But there is another cause for the improved tone of the Landlord class , and of the young men of what is commonly called the aristocracy ; and that is , a growing moral earnestness ; which is in great part owing ( that justice may be done on all sides ) to the Anglican movement .  How much soever Neo-Anglicanism may have failed as an Ecclesiastical or Theological system ; how much soever it may have proved itself , both by the national dislike of it , and by the defection of all its master-minds , to be radically un-English , it has at least awakened hundreds , perhaps thousands , of cultivated men and women to ask themselves whether God sent them into the world merely to eat , drink , and be merry , and to have ‘their souls saved’ upon the Spurgeon method , after they die ; and has taught them an answer to that question not unworthy of English Christians .  The Anglican movement , when it dies out , will leave behind at least a legacy of grand old authors disinterred , of art , of music ; of churches too , schools , cottages , and charitable institutions , which will form so many centres of future civilisation , and will entitle it to the respect , if not to the allegiance , of the future generation .  And more than this ; it has sown in the hearts of young gentlemen and young ladies seed which will not perish ; which , though it may develop into forms little expected by those who sowed it , will develop at least into a virtue more stately and reverent , more chivalrous and self-sacrificing , more genial and human , than can be learnt from that religion of the Stock Exchange , which reigned triumphant — for a year and a day — in the popular pulpits .  I have said , that Neo-Anglicanism has proved a failure , as seventeenth-century Anglicanism did .  The causes of that failure this book has tried to point out : and not one word which is spoken of it therein , but has been drawn from personal and too-intimate experience .  But now — peace to its ashes .  Is it so great a sin , to have been dazzled by the splendour of an impossible ideal ?  Is it so great a sin , to have had courage and conduct enough to attempt the enforcing of that ideal , in the face of the prejudices of a whole nation ?  And if that ideal was too narrow for the English nation , and for the modern needs of mankind , is that either so great a sin ?  Are other extant ideals , then , so very comprehensive ?  Does Mr. Spurgeon , then , take so much broader or nobler views of the capacities and destinies of his race , than that great genius , John Henry Newman ?  If the world cannot answer that question now , it will answer it promptly enough in another five-and-twenty years .  And meanwhile let not the party and the system which has conquered boast itself too loudly .  Let it take warning by the Whigs ; and suspect ( as many a looker-on more than suspects ) that its triumph may be , as with the Whigs , its ruin ; and that , having done the work for which it was sent into the world , there may only remain for it , to decay and die .  And die it surely will , if ( as seems too probable ) there succeeds to this late thirty years of peace a thirty years of storm .  For it has lost all hold upon the young , the active , the daring .  It has sunk into a compromise between originally opposite dogmas .  It has become a religion for Jacob the smooth man ; adapted to the maxims of the market , and leaving him full liberty to supplant his brother by all methods lawful in that market .  No longer can it embrace and explain all known facts of God and man , in heaven and earth , and satisfy utterly such minds and hearts as those of Cromwell’s Ironsides , or the Scotch Covenanters , or even of a Newton and a Colonel Gardiner .  Let it make the most of its Hedley Vicars and its Havelock , and sound its own trumpet as loudly as it can , in sounding theirs ; for they are the last specimens of heroism which it is likely to beget — if indeed it did in any true sense beget them , and if their gallantry was really owing to their creed , and not to the simple fact of their being — like others — English gentlemen .  Well may Jacob’s chaplains cackle in delighted surprise over their noble memories , like geese who have unwittingly hatched a swan !  But on Esau in general : — on poor rough Esau , who sails Jacob’s ships , digs Jacob’s mines , founds Jacob’s colonies , pours out his blood for him in those wars which Jacob himself has stirred up — while his sleek brother sits at home in his counting-house , enjoying at once ‘the means of grace’ and the produce of Esau’s labour — on him Jacob’s chaplains have less and less influence ; for him they have less and less good news .  He is afraid of them , and they of him ; the two do not comprehend one another , sympathise with one another ; they do not even understand one another’s speech .  The same social and moral gulf has opened between them , as parted the cultivated and wealthy Pharisee of Jerusalem from the rough fishers of the Galilæan Lake : and yet the Galilæan fishers ( if we are to trust Josephus and the Gospels ) were trusty , generous , affectionate — and it was not from among the Pharisees , it is said , that the Apostles were chosen .  Be that as it may , Esau has a birthright ; and this book , like all books which I have ever written , is written to tell him so ; and , I trust , has not been written in vain .  But it is not this book , or any man’s book , or any man at all , who can tell Esau the whole truth about himself , his powers , his duty , and his God .  Woman must do it , and not man .  His mother , his sister , the maid whom he may love ; and failing all these ( as they often will fail him , in the wild wandering life which he must live ) , those human angels of whom it is written — ‘The barren hath many more children than she who has an husband.’ And such will not be wanting .  As long as England can produce at once two such women as Florence Nightingale and Catherine Marsh , there is good hope that Esau will not be defrauded of his birthright ; and that by the time that Jacob comes crouching to him , to defend him against the enemies who are near at hand , Esau , instead of borrowing Jacob’s religion , may be able to teach Jacob his ; and the two brothers face together the superstition and anarchy of Europe , in the strength of a lofty and enlightened Christianity , which shall be thoroughly human , and therefore thoroughly divine .  PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION  This little tale was written between two and three years ago , in the hope that it might help to call the attention of wiser and better men than I am , to the questions which are now agitating the minds of the rising generation , and to the absolute necessity of solving them at once and earnestly , unless we would see the faith of our forefathers crumble away beneath the combined influence of new truths which are fancied to be incompatible with it , and new mistakes as to its real essence .  That this can be done I believe and know : if I had not believed it , I would never have put pen to paper on the subject .  I believe that the ancient Creed , the Eternal Gospel , will stand , and conquer , and prove its might in this age , as it has in every other for eighteen hundred years , by claiming , and subduing , and organising those young anarchic forces , which now , unconscious of their parentage , rebel against Him to whom they owe their being .  But for the time being , the young men and women of our day are fast parting from their parents and each other ; the more thoughtful are wandering either towards Rome , towards sheer materialism , or towards an unchristian and unphilosophic spiritualism .  Epicurism which , in my eyes , is the worst evil spirit of the three , precisely because it looks at first sight most like an angel of light .  The mass , again , are fancying that they are still adhering to the old creeds , the old church , to the honoured patriarchs of English Protestantism .  I wish I could agree with them in their belief about themselves .  To me they seem — with a small sprinkling of those noble and cheering exceptions to popular error which are to be found in every age of Christ’s church — to be losing most fearfully and rapidly the living spirit of Christianity , and to be , for that very reason , clinging all the more convulsively — and who can blame them ?  — to the outward letter of it , whether High Church or Evangelical ; unconscious , all the while , that they are sinking out of real living belief , into that dead self-deceiving belief-in-believing , which has been always heretofore , and is becoming in England now , the parent of the most blind , dishonest , and pitiless bigotry .  In the following pages I have attempted to show what some at least of the young in these days are really thinking and feeling .  I know well that my sketch is inadequate and partial : I have every reason to believe , from the criticisms which I have received since its first publication , that it is , as far as it goes , correct .  I put it as a problem .  It would be the height of arrogance in me to do more than indicate the direction in which I think a solution may be found .  I fear that my elder readers may complain that I have no right to start doubts without answering them .  I can only answer , — Would that I had started them !  would that I was not seeing them daily around me , under some form or other , in just the very hearts for whom one would most wish the peace and strength of a fixed and healthy faith .  To the young , this book can do no harm ; for it will put into their minds little but what is there already .  To the elder , it may do good ; for it may teach some of them , as I earnestly hope , something of the real , but too often utterly unsuspected , state of their own children’s minds ; something of the reasons of that calamitous estrangement between themselves and those who will succeed them , which is often too painful and oppressive to be confessed to their own hearts !  Whatever amount of obloquy this book may bring upon me , I shall think that a light price to pay , if by it I shall have helped , even in a single case , to ‘turn the hearts of the parents to the children , and the hearts of the children to the parents , before the great and terrible day of the Lord come , ’ — as come it surely will , if we persist much longer in substituting denunciation for sympathy , instruction for education , and Pharisaism for the Good News of the Kingdom of God .  CHAPTER I : THE PHILOSOPHY OF FOX-HUNTING  As this my story will probably run counter to more than one fashion of the day , literary and other , it is prudent to bow to those fashions wherever I honestly can ; and therefore to begin with a scrap of description .  The edge of a great fox-cover ; a flat wilderness of low leafless oaks fortified by a long , dreary , thorn capped clay ditch , with sour red water oozing out at every yard ; a broken gate leading into a straight wood ride , ragged with dead grasses and black with fallen leaves , the centre mashed into a quagmire by innumerable horsehoofs ; some forty red coats and some four black ; a sprinkling of young-farmers , resplendent in gold buttons and green ; a pair of sleek drab stable-keepers , showing off horses for sale ; the surgeon of the union , in Mackintosh and antigropelos ; two holiday schoolboys with trousers strapped down to bursting point , like a penny steamer’s safety-valve ; a midshipman , the only merry one in the field , bumping about on a fretting , sweating hack , with its nose a foot above its ears ; and Lancelot Smith , who then kept two good horses , and ‘rode forward’ as a fine young fellow of three-and-twenty who can afford it , and ‘has nothing else to do , ’ has a very good right to ride .  But what is a description , without a sketch of the weather ?  — In these Pantheist days especially , when a hero or heroine’s moral state must entirely depend on the barometer , and authors talk as if Christians were cabbages , and a man’s soul as well as his lungs might be saved by sea-breezes and sunshine ; or his character developed by wearing guano in his shoes , and training himself against a south wall — we must have a weather description , though , as I shall presently show , one in flat contradiction of the popular theory .  Luckily for our information , Lancelot was very much given to watch both the weather and himself , and had indeed , while in his teens , combined the two in a sort of a soul-almanack on the principles just mentioned — somewhat in this style : —  ‘ Monday , 21 st .  — Wind S.W. , bright sun , mercury at 30½ inches .  Felt my heart expanded towards the universe .  Organs of veneration and benevolence pleasingly excited ; and gave a shilling to a tramp .  An inexpressible joy bounded through every vein , and the soft air breathed purity and self-sacrifice through my soul .  As I watched the beetles , those children of the sun , who , as divine Shelley says , “ laden with light and odour , pass over the gleam of the living grass , ” I gained an Eden-glimpse of the pleasures of virtue .  ‘ N.B. .  Found the tramp drunk in a ditch .  I could not have degraded myself on such a day — ah !  how could he ?  ‘Tuesday , 22d .  — Barometer rapidly falling .  Heavy clouds in the south-east .  My heart sank into gloomy forebodings .  Read Manfred , and doubted whether I should live long .  The laden weight of destiny seemed to crush down my aching forehead , till the thunderstorm burst , and peace was restored to my troubled soul.’  This was very bad ; but to do justice to Lancelot , he had grown out of it at the time when my story begins .  He was now in the fifth act of his ‘Werterean’ stage ; that sentimental measles , which all clever men must catch once in their lives , and which , generally , like the physical measles , if taken early , settles their constitution for good or evil ; if taken late , goes far towards killing them .  Lancelot had found Byron and Shelley pall on his taste and commenced devouring Bulwer and worshipping Ernest Maltravers .  He had left Bulwer for old ballads and romances , and Mr. Carlyle’s reviews ; was next alternately chivalry-mad ; and Germany-mad ; was now reading hard at physical science ; and on the whole , trying to become a great man , without any very clear notion of what a great man ought to be .  Real education he never had had .  Bred up at home under his father , a rich merchant , he had gone to college with a large stock of general information , and a particular mania for dried plants , fossils , butterflies , and sketching , and some such creed as this : —  That he was very clever .  That he ought to make his fortune .  That a great many things were very pleasant — beautiful things among the rest .  That it was a fine thing to be ‘superior , ’ gentleman-like , generous , and courageous .  That a man ought to be religious .  And left college with a good smattering of classics and mathematics , picked up in the intervals of boat-racing and hunting , and much the same creed as he brought with him , except in regard to the last article .  The scenery-and-natural-history mania was now somewhat at a discount .  He had discovered a new natural object , including in itself all — more than all — yet found beauties and wonders — woman !  Draw , draw the veil and weep , guardian angel !  if such there be .  What was to be expected ?  Pleasant things were pleasant — there was no doubt of that , whatever else might be doubtful .  He had read Byron by stealth ; he had been flogged into reading Ovid and Tibullus ; and commanded by his private tutor to read Martial and Juvenal ‘for the improvement of his style.’ All conversation on the subject of love had been prudishly avoided , as usual , by his parents and teacher .  The parts of the Bible which spoke of it had been always kept out of his sight .  Love had been to him , practically , ground tabooed and ‘carnal.’ What was to be expected ?  Just what happened — if woman’s beauty had nothing holy in it , why should his fondness for it ?  Just what happens every day — that he had to sow his wild oats for himself , and eat the fruit thereof , and the dirt thereof also .  O fathers !  fathers !  and you , clergymen , who monopolise education !  either tell boys the truth about love , or do not put into their hands , without note or comment , the foul devil’s lies about it , which make up the mass of the Latin poets — and then go , fresh from teaching Juvenal and Ovid , to declaim at Exeter Hall against poor Peter Dens’s well-meaning prurience !  Had we not better take the beam out of our own eye before we meddle with the mote in the Jesuit’s ?  But where is my description of the weather all this time ?  I cannot , I am sorry to say , give any very cheerful account of the weather that day .  But what matter ?  Are Englishmen hedge-gnats , who only take their sport when the sun shines ?  Is it not , on the contrary , symbolical of our national character , that almost all our field amusements are wintry ones ?  Our fowling , our hunting , our punt-shooting ( pastime for Hymir himself and the frost giants ) — our golf and skating , — our very cricket , and boat-racing , and jack and grayling fishing , carried on till we are fairly frozen out .  We are a stern people , and winter suits us .  Nature then retires modestly into the background , and spares us the obtrusive glitter of summer , leaving us to think and work ; and therefore it happens that in England , it may be taken as a general rule , that whenever all the rest of the world is in-doors , we are out and busy , and on the whole , the worse the day , the better the deed .  The weather that day , the first day Lancelot ever saw his beloved , was truly national .  A silent , dim , distanceless , steaming , rotting day in March .  The last brown oak-leaf which had stood out the winter’s frost , spun and quivered plump down , and then lay ; as if ashamed to have broken for a moment the ghastly stillness , like an awkward guest at a great dumb dinner-party .  A cold suck of wind just proved its existence , by toothaches on the north side of all faces .  The spiders having been weather-bewitched the night before , had unanimously agreed to cover every brake and brier with gossamer-cradles , and never a fly to be caught in them ; like Manchester cotton-spinners madly glutting the markets in the teeth of ‘no demand.’ The steam crawled out of the dank turf , and reeked off the flanks and nostrils of the shivering horses , and clung with clammy paws to frosted hats and dripping boughs .  A soulless , skyless , catarrhal day , as if that bustling dowager , old mother Earth — what with match-making in spring , and fêtes champêtres in summer , and dinner-giving in autumn — was fairly worn out , and put to bed with the influenza , under wet blankets and the cold-water cure .  There sat Lancelot by the cover-side , his knees aching with cold and wet , thanking his stars that he was not one of the whippers-in who were lashing about in the dripping cover , laying up for themselves , in catering for the amusement of their betters , a probable old age of bed-ridden torture , in the form of rheumatic gout .  Not that he was at all happy — indeed , he had no reason to be so ; for , first , the hounds would not find ; next , he had left half-finished at home a review article on the Silurian System , which he had solemnly promised an abject and beseeching editor to send to post that night ; next , he was on the windward side of the cover , and dare not light a cigar ; and lastly , his mucous membrane in general was not in the happiest condition , seeing that he had been dining the evening before with Mr. Vaurien of Rottenpalings , a young gentleman of a convivial and melodious turn of mind , who sang — and played also — as singing men are wont — in more senses than one , and had ‘ladies and gentlemen’ down from town to stay with him ; and they sang and played too ; and so somehow between vingt-un and champagne-punch , Lancelot had not arrived at home till seven o’clock that morning , and was in a fit state to appreciate the feelings of our grandfathers , when , after the third bottle of port , they used to put the black silk tights into their pockets , slip on the leathers and boots , and ride the crop-tailed hack thirty miles on a winter’s night , to meet the hounds in the next county by ten in the morning .  They are ‘gone down to Hades , even many stalwart souls of heroes , ’ with John Warde of Squerries at their head — the fathers of the men who conquered at Waterloo ; and we their degenerate grandsons are left instead , with puny arms , and polished leather boots , and a considerable taint of hereditary disease , to sit in club-houses , and celebrate the progress of the species .  Whether Lancelot or his horse , under these depressing circumstances , fell asleep ; or whether thoughts pertaining to such a life , and its fitness for a clever and ardent young fellow in the nineteenth century , became gradually too painful , and had to be peremptorily shaken off , this deponent sayeth not ; but certainly , after five-and-thirty minutes of idleness and shivering , Lancelot opened his eyes with a sudden start , and struck spurs into his hunter without due cause shown ; whereat Shiver-the-timbers , who was no Griselda in temper — ( Lancelot had bought him out of the Pytchley for half his value , as unrideably vicious , when he had killed a groom , and fallen backwards on a rough-rider , the first season after he came up from Horncastle ) — responded by a furious kick or two , threw his head up , put his foot into a drain , and sprawled down all but on his nose , pitching Lancelot unawares shamefully on the pommel of his saddle .  A certain fatality , by the bye , had lately attended all Lancelot’s efforts to shine ; he never bought a new coat without tearing it mysteriously next day , or tried to make a joke without bursting out coughing in the middle ... and now the whole field were looking on at his mishap ; between disgust and the start he turned almost sick , and felt the blood rush into his cheeks and forehead as he heard a shout of coarse jovial laughter burst out close to him , and the old master of the hounds , Squire Lavington , roared aloud —  ‘A pretty sportsman you are , Mr. Smith , to fall asleep by the cover-side and let your horse down — and your pockets , too !  What’s that book on the ground ?  Sapping and studying still ?  I let nobody come out with my hounds with their pocket full of learning .  Hand it up here , Tom ; we’ll see what it is .  French , as I am no scholar !  Translate for us , Colonel Bracebridge !  ’  And , amid shouts of laughter , the gay Guardsman read out , —  ‘St .  Francis de Sales : Introduction to a Devout Life.’  Poor Lancelot !  Wishing himself fathoms under-ground , ashamed of his book , still more ashamed of himself for his shame , he had to sit there ten physical seconds , or spiritual years , while the colonel solemnly returned him the book , complimenting him on the proofs of its purifying influence which he had given the night before , in helping to throw the turnpike-gate into the river .  But ‘all things do end , ’ and so did this ; and the silence of the hounds also ; and a faint but knowing whimper drove St. Francis out of all heads , and Lancelot began to stalk slowly with a dozen horsemen up the wood-ride , to a fitful accompaniment of wandering hound-music , where the choristers were as invisible as nightingales among the thick cover .  And hark !  just as the book was returned to his pocket , the sweet hubbub suddenly crashed out into one jubilant shriek , and then swept away fainter and fainter among the trees .  The walk became a trot — the trot a canter .  Then a faint melancholy shout at a distance , answered by a ‘Stole away !  ’ from the fields ; a doleful ‘toot !  ’ of the horn ; the dull thunder of many horsehoofs rolling along the farther woodside .  Then red coats , flashing like sparks of fire across the gray gap of mist at the ride’s-mouth , then a whipper-in , bringing up a belated hound , burst into the pathway , smashing and plunging , with shut eyes , through ash-saplings and hassock-grass ; then a fat farmer , sedulously pounding through the mud , was overtaken and bespattered in spite of all his struggles ; — until the line streamed out into the wide rushy pasture , startling up pewits and curlews , as horsemen poured in from every side , and cunning old farmers rode off at inexplicable angles to some well-known haunts of pug : and right ahead , chiming and jangling sweet madness , the dappled pack glanced and wavered through the veil of soft grey mist .  ‘What’s the use of this hurry ?  ’ growled Lancelot .  ‘They will all be back again .  I never have the luck to see a run.’  But no ; on and on — down the wind and down the vale ; and the canter became a gallop , and the gallop a long straining stride ; and a hundred horsehoofs crackled like flame among the stubbles , and thundered fetlock-deep along the heavy meadows ; and every fence thinned the cavalcade , till the madness began to stir all bloods , and with grim earnest silent faces , the initiated few settled themselves to their work , and with the colonel and Lancelot at their head , ‘took their pleasure sadly , after the manner of their nation , ’ as old Froissart has it .  ‘Thorough bush , through brier , Thorough park , through pale ; ’  till the rolling grass-lands spread out into flat black open fallows , crossed with grassy baulks , and here and there a long melancholy line of tall elms , while before them the high chalk ranges gleamed above the mist like a vast wall of emerald enamelled with snow , and the winding river glittering at their feet .  ‘A polite fox !  ’ observed the colonel .  ‘He’s leading the squire straight home to Whitford , just in time for dinner.’  * * * * *  They were in the last meadow , with the stream before them .  A line of struggling heads in the swollen and milky current showed the hounds’ opinion of Reynard’s course .  The sportsmen galloped off towards the nearest bridge .  Bracebridge looked back at Lancelot , who had been keeping by his side in sulky rivalry , following him successfully through all manner of desperate places , and more and more angry with himself and the guiltless colonel , because he only followed , while the colonel’s quicker and unembarrassed wit , which lived wholly in the present moment , saw long before Lancelot , ‘how to cut out his work , ’ in every field .  ‘I shan’t go round , ’ quietly observed the colonel .  ‘Do you fancy I shall ?  ’ growled Lancelot , who took for granted — poor thin-skinned soul !  that the words were meant as a hit at himself .  ‘You’re a brace of geese , ’ politely observed the old squire ; ‘and you’ll find it out in rheumatic fever .  There — “ one fool makes many !  ” You’ll kill Smith before you’re done , colonel !  ’ and the old man wheeled away up the meadow , as Bracebridge shouted after him , —  ‘Oh , he’ll make a fine rider — in time !  ’  ‘In time !  ’ Lancelot could have knocked the unsuspecting colonel down for the word .  It just expressed the contrast , which had fretted him ever since he began to hunt with the Whitford Priors hounds .  The colonel’s long practice and consummate skill in all he took in hand , — his experience of all society , from the prairie Indian to Crockford’s , from the prize-ring to the continental courts , — his varied and ready store of information and anecdote , — the harmony and completeness of the man , — his consistency with his own small ideal , and his consequent apparent superiority everywhere and in everything to the huge awkward Titan-cub , who , though immeasurably beyond Bracebridge in intellect and heart , was still in a state of convulsive dyspepsia , ‘swallowing formulæ , ’ and daily well-nigh choked ; diseased throughout with that morbid self-consciousness and lust of praise , for which God prepares , with His elect , a bitter cure .  Alas !  poor Lancelot !  an unlicked bear , ‘with all his sorrows before him !  ’ —  ‘Come along , ’ quoth Bracebridge , between snatches of a tune , his coolness maddening Lancelot .  ‘Old Lavington will find us dry clothes , a bottle of port , and a brace of charming daughters , at the Priory .  In with you , little Mustang of the prairie !  Neck or nothing !  ’ —  And in an instant the small wiry American , and the huge Horncastle-bred hunter , were wallowing and staggering in the yeasty stream , till they floated into a deep reach , and swam steadily down to a low place in the bank .  They crossed the stream , passed the Priory Shrubberies , leapt the gate into the park , and then on and upward , called by the unseen Ariel’s music before them .  — Up , into the hills ; past white crumbling chalk-pits , fringed with feathered juniper and tottering ashes , their floors strewed with knolls of fallen soil and vegetation , like wooded islets in a sea of milk .  — Up , between steep ridges of tuft crested with black fir-woods and silver beech , and here and there a huge yew standing out alone , the advanced sentry of the forest , with its luscious fretwork of green velvet , like a mountain of Gothic spires and pinnacles , all glittering and steaming as the sun drank up the dew-drops .  The lark sprang upward into song , and called merrily to the new-opened sunbeams , while the wreaths and flakes of mist lingered reluctantly about the hollows , and clung with dewy fingers to every knoll and belt of pine .  — Up into the labyrinthine bosom of the hills , — but who can describe them ?  Is not all nature indescribable ?  every leaf infinite and transcendental ?  How much more those mighty downs , with their enormous sheets of spotless turf , where the dizzy eye loses all standard of size and distance before the awful simplicity , the delicate vastness , of those grand curves and swells , soft as the outlines of a Greek Venus , as if the great goddess-mother Hertha had laid herself down among the hills to sleep , her Titan limbs wrapt in a thin veil of silvery green .  Up , into a vast amphitheatre of sward , whose walls banked out the narrow sky above .  And here , in the focus of the huge ring , an object appeared which stirred strange melancholy in Lancelot , — a little chapel , ivy-grown , girded with a few yews , and elders , and grassy graves .  A climbing rose over the porch , and iron railings round the churchyard , told of human care ; and from the graveyard itself burst up one of those noble springs known as winter-bournes in the chalk ranges , which , awakened in autumn from the abysses to which it had shrunk during the summer’s drought , was hurrying down upon its six months’ course , a broad sheet of oily silver over a temporary channel of smooth greensward .  The hounds had checked in the woods behind ; now they poured down the hillside , so close together ‘that you might have covered them with a sheet , ’ straight for the little chapel .  A saddened tone of feeling spread itself through Lancelot’s heart .  There were the everlasting hills around , even as they had grown and grown for countless ages , beneath the still depths of the primeval chalk ocean , in the milky youth of this great English land .  And here was he , the insect of a day , fox-hunting upon them !  He felt ashamed , and more ashamed when the inner voice whispered — ‘Fox-hunting is not the shame — thou art the shame .  If thou art the insect of a day , it is thy sin that thou art one.’  And his sadness , foolish as it may seem , grew as he watched a brown speck fleet rapidly up the opposite hill , and heard a gay view-halloo burst from the colonel at his side .  The chase lost its charm for him the moment the game was seen .  Then vanished that mysterious delight of pursuing an invisible object , which gives to hunting and fishing their unutterable and almost spiritual charm ; which made Shakespeare a nightly poacher ; Davy and Chantrey the patriarchs of fly-fishing ; by which the twelve-foot rod is transfigured into an enchanter’s wand , potent over the unseen wonders of the water-world , to ‘call up spirits from the vasty deep , ’ which will really ‘come if you do call for them’ — at least if the conjuration be orthodox — and they there .  That spell was broken by the sight of poor wearied pug , his once gracefully-floating brush all draggled and drooping , as he toiled up the sheep-paths towards the open down above .  But Lancelot’s sadness reached its crisis , as he met the hounds just outside the churchyard .  Another moment — they had leaped the rails ; and there they swept round under the gray wall , leaping and yelling , like Berserk fiends among the frowning tombstones , over the cradles of the quiet dead .  Lancelot shuddered — the thing was not wrong — ‘it was no one’s fault , ’ — but there was a ghastly discord in it .  Peace and strife , time and eternity — the mad noisy flesh , and the silent immortal spirit , — the frivolous game of life’s outside show , and the terrible earnest of its inward abysses , jarred together without and within him .  He pulled his horse up violently , and stood as if rooted to the place , gazing at he knew not what .  The hounds caught sight of the fox , burst into one frantic shriek of joy — and then a sudden and ghastly stillness , as , mute and breathless , they toiled up the hillside , gaining on their victim at every stride .  The patter of the horsehoofs and the rattle of rolling flints died away above .  Lancelot looked up , startled at the silence ; laughed aloud , he knew not why , and sat , regardless of his pawing and straining horse , still staring at the chapel and the graves .  On a sudden the chapel-door opened , and a figure , timidly yet loftily stepped out without observing him , and suddenly turning round , met him full , face to face , and stood fixed with surprise as completely as Lancelot himself .  That face and figure , and the spirit which spoke through them , entered his heart at once , never again to leave it .  Her features were aquiline and grand , without a shade of harshness ; her eyes shone out like twain lakes of still azure , beneath a broad marble cliff of polished forehead ; her rich chestnut hair rippled downward round the towering neck .  With her perfect masque and queenly figure , and earnest , upward gaze , she might have been the very model from which Raphael conceived his glorious St. Catherine — the ideal of the highest womanly genius , softened into self-forgetfulness by girlish devotion .  She was simply , almost coarsely dressed ; but a glance told him that she was a lady , by the courtesy of man as well as by the will of God .  They gazed one moment more at each other — but what is time to spirits ?  With them , as with their Father , ‘one day is as a thousand years.’ But that eye-wedlock was cut short the next instant by the decided interference of the horse , who , thoroughly disgusted at his master’s whole conduct , gave a significant shake of his head , and shamming frightened ( as both women and horses will do when only cross ) , commenced a war-dance , which drove Argemone Lavington into the porch , and gave the bewildered Lancelot an excuse for dashing madly up the hill after his companions .  ‘What a horrible ugly face !  ’ said Argemone to herself , ‘but so clever , and so unhappy !  ’  Blest pity !  true mother of that graceless scamp , young Love , who is ashamed of his real pedigree , and swears to this day that he is the child of Venus !  — the coxcomb !  * * * * *  [ Here , for the sake of the reader , we omit , or rather postpone a long dissertation on the famous Erototheogonic chorus of Aristophanes’s Birds , with illustrations taken from all earth and heaven , from the Vedas and Proclus to Jacob Boëhmen and Saint Theresa .  ]  ‘The dichotomy of Lancelot’s personality , ’ as the Germans would call it , returned as he dashed on .  His understanding was trying to ride , while his spirit was left behind with Argemone .  Hence loose reins and a looser seat .  He rolled about like a tipsy man , holding on , in fact , far more by his spurs than by his knees , to the utter infuriation of Shiver-the-timbers , who kicked and snorted over the down like one of Mephistopheles’s Demon-steeds .  They had mounted the hill — the deer fled before them in terror — they neared the park palings .  In the road beyond them the hounds were just killing their fox , struggling and growling in fierce groups for the red gobbets of fur , a panting , steaming ring of horses round them .  Half a dozen voices hailed him as he came up .  ‘Where have you been ?  ’ ‘He’ll tumble off !  ’ ‘He’s had a fall !  ’ ‘No he hasn’t !  ’ ‘’Ware hounds , man alive !  ’ ‘He’ll break his neck !  ’  ‘He has broken it , at last !  ’ shouted the colonel , as Shiver-the-timbers rushed at the high pales , out of breath , and blind with rage .  Lancelot saw and heard nothing till he was awakened from his dream by the long heave of the huge brute’s shoulder , and the maddening sensation of sweeping through the air over the fence .  He started , checked the curb , the horse threw up his head , fulfilling his name by driving his knees like a battering-ram against the pales — the top-bar bent like a withe , flew out into a hundred splinters , and man and horse rolled over headlong into the hard flint-road .  For one long sickening second Lancelot watched the blue sky between his own knees .  Then a crash as if a shell had burst in his face — a horrible grind — a sheet of flame — and the blackness of night .  Did you ever feel it , reader ?  When he awoke , he found himself lying in bed , with Squire Lavington sitting by him .  There was real sorrow in the old man’s face , ‘Come to himself !  ’ and a great joyful oath rolled out .  ‘The boldest rider of them all !  I wouldn’t have lost him for a dozen ready-made spick and span Colonel Bracebridges !  ’  ‘Quite right , squire !  ’ answered a laughing voice from behind the curtain .  ‘Smith has a clear two thousand a year , and I live by my wits !  ’  CHAPTER II : SPRING YEARNINGS  I heard a story the other day of our most earnest and genial humorist , who is just now proving himself also our most earnest and genial novelist .  ‘I like your novel exceedingly , ’ said a lady ; ‘the characters are so natural — all but the baronet , and he surely is overdrawn : it is impossible to find such coarseness in his rank of life !  ’  The artist laughed .  ‘And that character , ’ said he , ‘is almost the only exact portrait in the whole book.’  So it is .  People do not see the strange things which pass them every day .  ‘The romance of real life’ is only one to the romantic spirit .  And then they set up for critics , instead of pupils ; as if the artist’s business was not just to see what they cannot see — to open their eyes to the harmonies and the discords , the miracles and the absurdities , which seem to them one uniform gray fog of commonplaces .  Then let the reader believe , that whatsoever is commonplace in my story is my own invention .  Whatsoever may seem extravagant or startling is most likely to be historic fact , else I should not have dared to write it down , finding God’s actual dealings here much too wonderful to dare to invent many fresh ones for myself .  Lancelot , who had had a severe concussion of the brain and a broken leg , kept his bed for a few weeks , and his room for a few more .  Colonel Bracebridge installed himself at the Priory , and nursed him with indefatigable good-humour and few thanks .  He brought Lancelot his breakfast before hunting , described the run to him when he returned , read him to sleep , told him stories of grizzly bear and buffalo-hunts , made him laugh in spite of himself at extempore comic medleys , kept his tables covered with flowers from the conservatory , warmed his chocolate , and even his bed .  Nothing came amiss to him , and he to nothing .  Lancelot longed at first every hour to be rid of him , and eyed him about the room as a bulldog does the monkey who rides him .  In his dreams he was Sinbad the Sailor , and Bracebridge the Old Man of the Sea ; but he could not hold out against the colonel’s merry bustling kindliness , and the almost womanish tenderness of his nursing .  The ice thawed rapidly ; and one evening it split up altogether , when Bracebridge , who was sitting drawing by Lancelot’s sofa , instead of amusing himself with the ladies below , suddenly threw his pencil into the fire , and broke out , à propos de rien —  ‘What a strange pair we are , Smith !  I think you just the best fellow I ever met , and you hate me like poison — you can’t deny it.’  There was something in the colonel’s tone so utterly different from his usual courtly and measured speech , that Lancelot was taken completely by surprise , and stammered out , —  ‘I — I — I — no — no. I know I am very foolish — ungrateful .  But I do hate you , ’ he said , with a sudden impulse , ‘and I’ll tell you why.’  ‘Give me your hand , ’ quoth the colonel : ‘I like that .  Now we shall see our way with each other , at least.’  ‘Because , ’ said Lancelot slowly , ‘because you are cleverer than I , readier than I , superior to me in every point.’  The colonel laughed , not quite merrily .  Lancelot went on , holding down his shaggy brows .  ‘I am a brute and an ass !  — And yet I do not like to tell you so .  For if I am an ass , what are you ?  ’  ‘Heyday !  ’  ‘Look here .  — I am wasting my time and brains on ribaldry , but I am worth nothing better — at least , I think so at times ; but you , who can do anything you put your hand to , what business have you , in the devil’s name , to be throwing yourself away on gimcracks and fox-hunting foolery ?  Heavens !  If I had your talents , I’d be — I’d make a name for myself before I died , if I died to make it.’ The colonel griped his hand hard , rose , and looked out of the window for a few minutes .  There was a dead , brooding silence , till he turned to Lancelot , —  ‘Mr .  Smith , I thank you for your honesty , but good advice may come too late .  I am no saint , and God only knows how much less of one I may become ; but mark my words , — if you are ever tempted by passion , and vanity , and fine ladies , to form liaisons , as the Jezebels call them , snares , and nets , and labyrinths of blind ditches , to keep you down through life , stumbling and grovelling , hating yourself and hating the chain to which you cling — in that hour pray — pray as if the devil had you by the throat , — to Almighty God , to help you out of that cursed slough !  There is nothing else for it !  — pray , I tell you !  ’  There was a terrible earnestness about the guardsman’s face which could not be mistaken .  Lancelot looked at him for a moment , and then dropped his eyes ashamed , as if he had intruded on the speaker’s confidence by witnessing his emotion .  In a moment the colonel had returned to his smile and his polish .  ‘And now , my dear invalid , I must beg your pardon for sermonising .  What do you say to a game of écarté ?  We must play for love , or we shall excite ourselves , and scandalise Mrs. Lavington’s piety.’ And the colonel pulled a pack of cards out of his pocket , and seeing that Lancelot was too thoughtful for play , commenced all manner of juggler’s tricks , and chuckled over them like any schoolboy .  ‘Happy man !  ’ thought Lancelot , ‘to have the strength of will which can thrust its thoughts away once and for all.’ No , Lancelot !  more happy are they whom God will not allow to thrust their thoughts from them till the bitter draught has done its work .  From that day , however , there was a cordial understanding between the two .  They never alluded to the subject ; but they had known the bottom of each other’s heart .  Lancelot’s sick-room was now pleasant enough , and he drank in daily his new friend’s perpetual stream of anecdote , till March and hunting were past , and April was half over .  The old squire came up after dinner regularly ( during March he had hunted every day , and slept every evening ) ; and the trio chatted along merrily enough , by the help of whist and backgammon , upon the surface of this little island of life , — which is , like Sinbad’s , after all only the back of a floating whale , ready to dive at any moment .  — And then ?  —  But what was Argemone doing all this time ?  Argemone was busy in her boudoir ( too often a true boudoir to her ) among books and statuettes , and dried flowers , fancying herself , and not unfairly , very intellectual .  She had four new manias every year ; her last winter’s one had been that bottle-and-squirt mania , miscalled chemistry ; her spring madness was for the Greek drama .  She had devoured Schlegel’s lectures , and thought them divine ; and now she was hard at work on Sophocles , with a little help from translations , and thought she understood him every word .  Then she was somewhat High-Church in her notions , and used to go up every Wednesday and Friday to the chapel in the hills , where Lancelot had met her , for an hour’s mystic devotion , set off by a little graceful asceticism .  As for Lancelot , she never thought of him but as an empty-headed fox-hunter who had met with his deserts ; and the brilliant accounts which the all smoothing colonel gave at dinner of Lancelot’s physical well doing and agreeable conversation only made her set him down the sooner as a twin clever-do-nothing to the despised Bracebridge , whom she hated for keeping her father in a roar of laughter .  But her sister , little Honoria , had all the while been busy messing and cooking with her own hands for the invalid ; and almost fell in love with the colonel for his watchful kindness .  And here a word about Honoria , to whom Nature , according to her wont with sisters , had given almost everything which Argemone wanted , and denied almost everything which Argemone had , except beauty .  And even in that , the many-sided mother had made her a perfect contrast to her sister , — tiny and luscious , dark-eyed and dark-haired ; as full of wild simple passion as an Italian , thinking little , except where she felt much — which was , indeed , everywhere ; for she lived in a perpetual April-shower of exaggerated sympathy for all suffering , whether in novels or in life ; and daily gave the lie to that shallow old calumny , that ‘fictitious sorrows harden the heart to real ones.’  Argemone was almost angry with her sometimes , when she trotted whole days about the village from school to sick-room : perhaps conscience hinted to her that her duty , too , lay rather there than among her luxurious day-dreams .  But , alas !  though she would have indignantly repelled the accusation of selfishness , yet in self and for self alone she lived ; and while she had force of will for any so-called ‘self-denial , ’ and would fast herself cross and stupefied , and quite enjoy kneeling thinly clad and barefoot on the freezing chapel-floor on a winter’s morning , yet her fastidious delicacy revolted at sitting , like Honoria , beside the bed of the ploughman’s consumptive daughter , in a reeking , stifling , lean-to garret , in which had slept the night before , the father , mother , and two grown-up boys , not to mention a new-married couple , the sick girl , and , alas !  her baby .  And of such bedchambers there were too many in Whitford Priors .  The first evening that Lancelot came downstairs , Honoria clapped her hands outright for joy as he entered , and ran up and down for ten minutes , fetching and carrying endless unnecessary cushions and footstools ; while Argemone greeted him with a cold distant bow , and a fine-lady drawl of carefully commonplace congratulations .  Her heart smote her though , as she saw the wan face and the wild , melancholy , moonstruck eyes once more glaring through and through her ; she found a comfort in thinking his stare impertinent , drew herself up , and turned away ; once , indeed , she could not help listening , as Lancelot thanked Mrs. Lavington for all the pious and edifying books with which the good lady had kept his room rather than his brain furnished for the last six weeks ; he was going to say more , but he saw the colonel’s quaint foxy eye peering at him , remembered St. Francis de Sales , and held his tongue .  But , as her destiny was , Argemone found herself , in the course of the evening , alone with Lancelot , at the open window .  It was a still , hot , heavy night , after long easterly drought ; sheet-lightning glimmered on the far horizon over the dark woodlands ; the coming shower had sent forward as his herald a whispering draught of fragrant air .  ‘What a delicious shiver is creeping over those limes !  ’ said Lancelot , half to himself .  The expression struck Argemone : it was the right one , and it seemed to open vistas of feeling and observation in the speaker which she had not suspected .  There was a rich melancholy in the voice ; — she turned to look at him .  ‘Ay , ’ he went on ; ‘and the same heat which crisps those thirsty leaves must breed the thunder-shower which cools them ?  But so it is throughout the universe : every yearning proves the existence of an object meant to satisfy it ; the same law creates both the giver and the receiver , the longing and its home.’  ‘If one could but know sometimes what it is for which one is longing !  ’ said Argemone , without knowing that she was speaking from her inmost heart : but thus does the soul involuntarily lay bare its most unspoken depths in the presence of its yet unknown mate , and then shudders at its own abandon as it first tries on the wedding garment of Paradise .  Lancelot was not yet past the era at which young geniuses are apt to ‘talk book’ at little .  ‘For what ?  ’ he answered , flashing up according to his fashion .  ‘To be ; — to be great ; to have done one mighty work before we die , and live , unloved or loved , upon the lips of men .  For this all long who are not mere apes and wall-flies.’  ‘So longed the founders of Babel , ’ answered Argemone , carelessly , to this tirade .  She had risen a strange fish , the cunning beauty , and now she was trying her fancy flies over him one by one .  ‘And were they so far wrong ?  ’ answered he .  ‘From the Babel society sprung our architecture , our astronomy , politics , and colonisation .  No doubt the old Hebrew sheiks thought them impious enough , for daring to build brick walls instead of keeping to the good old-fashioned tents , and gathering themselves into a nation instead of remaining a mere family horde ; and gave their own account of the myth , just as the antediluvian savages gave theirs of that strange Eden scene , by the common interpretation of which the devil is made the first inventor of modesty .  Men are all conservatives ; everything new is impious , till we get accustomed to it ; and if it fails , the mob piously discover a divine vengeance in the mischance , from Babel to Catholic Emancipation.’  Lancelot had stuttered horribly during the latter part of this most heterodox outburst , for he had begun to think about himself , and try to say a fine thing , suspecting all the while that it might not be true .  But Argemone did not remark the stammering : the new thoughts startled and pained her ; but there was a daring grace about them .  She tried , as women will , to answer him with arguments , and failed , as women will fail .  She was accustomed to lay down the law à la Madame de Staël , to savants and non-savants and be heard with reverence , as a woman should be .  But poor truth-seeking Lancelot did not see what sex had to do with logic ; he flew at her as if she had been a very barrister , and hunted her mercilessly up and down through all sorts of charming sophisms , as she begged the question , and shifted her ground , as thoroughly right in her conclusion as she was wrong in her reasoning , till she grew quite confused and pettish .  — And then Lancelot suddenly shrank into his shell , claws and all , like an affrighted soldier-crab , hung down his head , and stammered out some incoherencies , — ‘N-n-not accustomed to talk to women — ladies , I mean .  F-forgot myself .  — Pray forgive me !  ’ And he looked up , and her eyes , half-amused , met his , and she saw that they were filled with tears .  ‘What have I to forgive ?  ’ she said , more gently , wondering on what sort of strange sportsman she had fallen .  ‘You treat me like an equal ; you will deign to argue with me .  But men in general — oh , they hide their contempt for us , if not their own ignorance , under that mask of chivalrous deference !  ’ and then in the nasal fine ladies’ key , which was her shell , as bitter brusquerie was his , she added , with an Amazon queen’s toss of the head , — ‘You must come and see us often .  We shall suit each other , I see , better than most whom we see here.’  A sneer and a blush passed together over Lancelot’s ugliness .  ‘What , better than the glib Colonel Bracebridge yonder ?  ’  ‘Oh , he is witty enough , but he lives on the surface of everything !  He is altogether shallow and blasé .  His good-nature is the fruit of want of feeling ; between his gracefulness and his sneering persiflage he is a perfect Mephistopheles-Apollo.’  What a snare a decently-good nickname is !  Out it must come , though it carry a lie on its back .  But the truth was , Argemone thought herself infinitely superior to the colonel , for which simple reason she could not in the least understand him .  [ By the bye , how subtly Mr. Tennyson has embodied all this in The Princess .  How he shows us the woman , when she takes her stand on the false masculine ground of intellect , working out her own moral punishment , by destroying in herself the tender heart of flesh , which is either woman’s highest blessing or her bitterest curse ; how she loses all feminine sensibility to the under-current of feeling in us poor world-worn , case-hardened men , and falls from pride to sternness , from sternness to sheer inhumanity .  I should have honoured myself by pleading guilty to stealing much of Argemone’s character from The Princess , had not the idea been conceived , and fairly worked out , long before the appearance of that noble poem .  ]  They said no more to each other that evening .  Argemone was called to the piano ; and Lancelot took up the Sporting Magazine , and read himself to sleep till the party separated for the night .  Argemone went up thoughtfully to her own room .  The shower had fallen , and the moon was shining bright , while every budding leaf and knot of mould steamed up cool perfume , borrowed from the treasures of the thundercloud .  All around was working the infinite mystery of birth and growth , of giving and taking , of beauty and use .  All things were harmonious — all things reciprocal without .  Argemone felt herself needless , lonely , and out of tune with herself and nature .  She sat in the window , and listlessly read over to herself a fragment of her own poetry : —  SAPPHO  She lay among the myrtles on the cliff ; Above her glared the moon ; beneath , the sea .  Upon the white horizon Athos’ peak Weltered in burning haze ; all airs were dead ; The sicale slept among the tamarisk’s hair ; The birds sat dumb and drooping .  Far below The lazy sea-weed glistened in the sun : The lazy sea-fowl dried their steaming wings ; The lazy swell crept whispering up the ledge , And sank again .  Great Pan was laid to rest ; And mother Earth watched by him as he slept , And hushed her myriad children for awhile .  She lay among the myrtles on the cliff ; And sighed for sleep , for sleep that would not hear , But left her tossing still : for night and day A mighty hunger yearned within her heart , Till all her veins ran fever , and her cheek , Her long thin hands , and ivory-channell’d feet , Were wasted with the wasting of her soul .  Then peevishly she flung her on her face , And hid her eyeballs from the blinding glare , And fingered at the grass , and tried to cool Her crisp hot lips against the crisp hot sward : And then she raised her head , and upward cast Wild looks from homeless eyes , whose liquid light Gleamed out between deep folds of blue-black hair , As gleam twin lakes between the purple peaks Of deep Parnassus , at the mournful moon .  Beside her lay a lyre .  She snatched the shell , And waked wild music from its silver strings ; Then tossed it sadly by , — ‘Ah , hush !  ’ she cries , ‘Dead offspring of the tortoise and the mine !  Why mock my discords with thine harmonies ?  ‘Although a thrice-Olympian lot be thine , Only to echo back in every tone , The moods of nobler natures than thine own.’  ‘No !  ’ she said .  ‘That soft and rounded rhyme suits ill with Sappho’s fitful and wayward agonies .  She should burst out at once into wild passionate life-weariness , and disgust at that universe , with whose beauty she has filled her eyes in vain , to find it always a dead picture , unsatisfying , unloving — as I have found it.’  Sweet self-deceiver !  had you no other reason for choosing as your heroine Sappho , the victim of the idolatry of intellect — trying in vain to fill her heart with the friendship of her own sex , and then sinking into mere passion for a handsome boy , and so down into self-contempt and suicide ?  She was conscious , I do believe , of no other reason than that she gave ; but consciousness is a dim candle — over a deep mine .  ‘After all , ’ she said pettishly , ‘people will call it a mere imitation of Shelley’s Alastor .  And what harm if it is ?  Is there to be no female Alastor ?  Has not the woman as good a right as the man to long after ideal beauty — to pine and die if she cannot find it ; and regenerate herself in its light ?  ’  ‘Yo-hoo-oo-oo !  Youp , youp !  Oh-hooo !  ’ arose doleful through the echoing shrubbery .  Argemone started and looked out .  It was not a banshee , but a forgotten fox-hound puppy , sitting mournfully on the gravel-walk beneath , staring at the clear ghastly moon .  She laughed and blushed — there was a rebuke in it .  She turned to go to rest ; and as she knelt and prayed at her velvet faldstool , among all the nicknacks which now-a-days make a luxury of devotion , was it strange if , after she had prayed for the fate of nations and churches , and for those who , as she thought , were fighting at Oxford the cause of universal truth and reverend antiquity , she remembered in her petitions the poor godless youth , with his troubled and troubling eloquence ?  But it was strange that she blushed when she mentioned his name — why should she not pray for him as she prayed for others ?  Perhaps she felt that she did not pray for him as she prayed for others .  She left the Æolian harp in the window , as a luxury if she should wake , and coiled herself up among lace pillows and eider blemos ; and the hound coiled himself up on the gravel-walk , after a solemn vesper-ceremony of three turns round in his own length , looking vainly for a ‘soft stone.’ The finest of us are animals after all , and live by eating and sleeping : and , taken as animals , not so badly off either — unless we happen to be Dorsetshire labourers — or Spitalfields weavers — or colliery children — or marching soldiers — or , I am afraid , one half of English souls this day .  And Argemone dreamed ; — that she was a fox , flying for her life through a churchyard — and Lancelot was a hound , yelling and leaping , in a red coat and white buckskins , close upon her — and she felt his hot breath , and saw his white teeth glare ... And then her father was there : and he was an Italian boy , and played the organ — and Lancelot was a dancing dog , and stood up and danced to the tune of ‘ C’est l’amour , l’amour , l’amour , ’ pitifully enough , in his red coat — and she stood up and danced too ; but she found her fox-fur dress insufficient , and begged hard for a paper frill — which was denied her : whereat she cried bitterly and woke ; and saw the Night peeping in with her bright diamond eyes , and blushed , and hid her beautiful face in the pillows , and fell asleep again .  What the little imp , who managed this puppet-show on Argemone’s brain-stage , may have intended to symbolise thereby , and whence he stole his actors and stage-properties , and whether he got up the interlude for his own private fun , or for that of a choir of brother Eulenspiegels , or , finally , for the edification of Argemone as to her own history , past , present , or future , are questions which we must leave unanswered , till physicians have become a little more of metaphysicians , and have given up their present plan of ignoring for nine hundred and ninety-nine pages that most awful and significant custom of dreaming , and then in the thousandth page talking the boldest materialist twaddle about it .  In the meantime , Lancelot , contrary to the colonel’s express commands , was sitting up to indite the following letter to his cousin , the Tractarian curate : —  ‘You complain that I waste my time in field-sports : how do you know that I waste my time ?  I find within myself certain appetites ; and I suppose that the God whom you say made me , made those appetites as a part of me .  Why are they to be crushed any more than any other part of me ?  I am the whole of what I find in myself — am I to pick and choose myself out of myself ?  And besides , I feel that the exercise of freedom , activity , foresight , daring , independent self-determination , even in a few minutes’ burst across country , strengthens me in mind as well as in body .  It might not do so to you ; but you are of a different constitution , and , from all I see , the power of a man’s muscles , the excitability of his nerves , the shape and balance of his brain , make him what he is .  Else what is the meaning of physiognomy ?  Every man’s destiny , as the Turks say , stands written on his forehead .  One does not need two glances at your face to know that you would not enjoy fox-hunting , that you would enjoy book-learning and “ refined repose , ” as they are pleased to call it .  Every man carries his character in his brain .  You all know that , and act upon it when you have to deal with a man for sixpence ; but your religious dogmas , which make out that everyman comes into the world equally brutish and fiendish , make you afraid to confess it .  I don’t quarrel with a “ douce ” man like you , with a large organ of veneration , for following your bent .  But if I am fiery , with a huge cerebellum , why am I not to follow mine ?  — For that is what you do , after all — what you like best .  It is all very easy for a man to talk of conquering his appetites , when he has none to conquer .  Try and conquer your organ of veneration , or of benevolence , or of calculation — then I will call you an ascetic .  Why not !  — The same Power which made the front of one’s head made the back , I suppose ?  ‘And , I tell you , hunting does me good .  It awakens me out of my dreary mill-round of metaphysics .  It sweeps away that infernal web of self-consciousness , and absorbs me in outward objects ; and my red-hot Perillus’s bull cools in proportion as my horse warms .  I tell you , I never saw a man who could cut out his way across country who could not cut his way through better things when his turn came .  The cleverest and noblest fellows are sure to be the best riders in the long run .  And as for bad company and “ the world , ” when you take to going in the first-class carriages for fear of meeting a swearing sailor in the second-class — when those who have “ renounced the world ” give up buying and selling in the funds — when my uncle , the pious banker , who will only “ associate ” with the truly religious , gives up dealing with any scoundrel or heathen who can “ do business ” with him — then you may quote pious people’s opinions to me .  In God’s name , if the Stock Exchange , and railway stagging , and the advertisements in the Protestant Hue-and-Cry , and the frantic Mammon-hunting which has been for the last fifty years the peculiar pursuit of the majority of Quakers , Dissenters , and Religious Churchmen , are not The World , what is ?  I don’t complain of them , though ; Puritanism has interdicted to them all art , all excitement , all amusement — except money-making .  It is their dernier ressort , poor souls !  ‘But you must explain to us naughty fox-hunters how all this agrees with the good book .  We see plainly enough , in the meantime , how it agrees with “ poor human nature .  ” We see that the “ religious world , ” like the “ great world , ” and the “ sporting world , ” and the “ literary world , ”  “ Compounds for sins she is inclined to , By damning those she has no mind to ; ”  and that because England is a money-making country , and money-making is an effeminate pursuit , therefore all sedentary and spoony sins , like covetousness , slander , bigotry , and self-conceit , are to be cockered and plastered over , while the more masculine vices , and no-vices also , are mercilessly hunted down by your cold-blooded , soft-handed religionists .  ‘This is a more quiet letter than usual from me , my dear coz , for many of your reproofs cut me home : they angered me at the time ; but I deserve them .  I am miserable , self-disgusted , self-helpless , craving for freedom , and yet crying aloud for some one to come and guide me , and teach me ; and who is there in these days who could teach a fast man , even if he would try ?  Be sure , that as long as you and yours make piety a synonym for unmanliness , you will never convert either me or any other good sportsman .  ‘By the bye , my dear fellow , was I asleep or awake when I seemed to read in the postscript of your last letter , something about “ being driven to Rome after all ” ?  ... Why thither , of all places in heaven or earth ?  You know , I have no party interest in the question .  All creeds are very much alike to me just now .  But allow me to ask , in a spirit of the most tolerant curiosity , what possible celestial bait , either of the useful or the agreeable kind , can the present excellent Pope , or his adherents , hold out to you in compensation for the solid earthly pudding which you would have to desert ?  ... I daresay , though , that I shall not comprehend your answer when it comes .  I am , you know , utterly deficient in that sixth sense of the angelic or supralunar beautiful , which fills your soul with ecstasy .  You , I know , expect and long to become an angel after death : I am under the strange hallucination that my body is part of me , and in spite of old Plotinus , look with horror at a disembodiment till the giving of that new body , the great perfection of which , in your eyes , and those of every one else , seems to be , that it will be less , and not more of a body , than our present one ... Is this hope , to me at once inconceivable and contradictory , palpable and valuable enough to you to send you to that Italian Avernus , to get it made a little more certain ?  If so , I despair of your making your meaning intelligible to a poor fellow wallowing , like me , in the Hylic Borboros — or whatever else you may choose to call the unfortunate fact of being flesh and blood ... Still , write.’  CHAPTER III : NEW ACTORS , AND A NEW STAGE  When Argemone rose in the morning , her first thought was of Lancelot .  His face haunted her .  The wild brilliance of his intellect struggling through foul smoke-clouds , had haunted her still more .  She had heard of his profligacy , his bursts of fierce Berserk-madness ; and yet now these very faults , instead of repelling , seemed to attract her , and intensify her longing to save him .  She would convert him ; purify him ; harmonise his discords .  And that very wish gave her a peace she had never felt before .  She had formed her idea ; she had now a purpose for which to live , and she determined to concentrate herself for the work , and longed for the moment when she should meet Lancelot , and begin — how , she did not very clearly see .  It is an old jest — the fair devotee trying to convert the young rake .  Men of the world laugh heartily at it ; and so does the devil , no doubt .  If any readers wish to be fellow-jesters with that personage , they may ; but , as sure as old Saxon women-worship remains for ever a blessed and healing law of life , the devotee may yet convert the rake — and , perhaps , herself into the bargain .  Argemone looked almost angrily round at her beloved books and drawings ; for they spoke a message to her which they had never spoken before , of self-centred ambition .  ‘Yes , ’ she said aloud to herself , ‘I have been selfish , utterly !  Art , poetry , science — I believe , after all , that I have only loved them for my own sake , not for theirs , because they would make me something , feed my conceit of my own talents .  How infinitely more glorious to find my work-field and my prize , not in dead forms and colours , or ink-and-paper theories , but in a living , immortal , human spirit !  I will study no more , except the human heart , and only that to purify and ennoble it.’  True , Argemone ; and yet , like all resolutions , somewhat less than the truth .  That morning , indeed , her purpose was simple as God’s own light .  She never dreamed of exciting Lancelot’s admiration , even his friendship for herself .  She would have started as from a snake , from the issue which the reader very clearly foresees , that Lancelot would fall in love , not with Young Englandism , but with Argemone Lavington .  But yet self is not eradicated even from a woman’s heart in one morning before breakfast .  Besides , it is not ‘benevolence , ’ but love — the real Cupid of flesh and blood , who can first  ‘Touch the chord of self which , trembling , Passes in music out of sight.’  But a time for all things ; and it is now time for Argemone to go down to breakfast , having prepared some dozen imaginary dialogues between herself and Lancelot , in which , of course , her eloquence always had the victory .  She had yet to learn , that it is better sometimes not to settle in one’s heart what we shall speak , for the Everlasting Will has good works ready prepared for us to walk in , by what we call fortunate accident ; and it shall be given us in that day and that hour what we shall speak .  Lancelot , in the meantime , shrank from meeting Argemone ; and was quite glad of the weakness which kept him upstairs .  Whether he was afraid of her — whether he was ashamed of himself or of his crutches , I cannot tell , but I daresay , reader , you are getting tired of all this soul-dissecting .  So we will have a bit of action again , for the sake of variety , if for nothing better .  Of all the species of lovely scenery which England holds , none , perhaps , is more exquisite than the banks of the chalk-rivers — the perfect limpidity of the water , the gay and luxuriant vegetation of the banks and ditches , the masses of noble wood embosoming the villages , the unique beauty of the water-meadows , living sheets of emerald and silver , tinkling and sparkling , cool under the fiercest sun , brilliant under the blackest clouds .  — There , if anywhere , one would have expected to find Arcadia among fertility , loveliness , industry , and wealth .  But , alas for the sad reality !  the cool breath of those glittering water-meadows too often floats laden with poisonous miasma .  Those picturesque villages are generally the perennial hotbeds of fever and ague , of squalid penury , sottish profligacy , dull discontent too stale for words .  There is luxury in the park , wealth in the huge farm-steadings , knowledge in the parsonage : but the poor ?  those by whose dull labour all that luxury and wealth , ay , even that knowledge , is made possible — what are they ?  We shall see , please God , ere the story’s end .  But of all this Lancelot as yet thought nothing .  He , too , had to be emancipated , as much as Argemone , from selfish dreams ; to learn to work trustfully in the living Present , not to gloat sentimentally over the unreturning Past .  But his time was not yet come ; and little he thought of all the work which lay ready for him within a mile of the Priory , as he watched the ladies go out for the afternoon , and slipped down to the Nun’s-pool on his crutches to smoke and fish , and build castles in the air .  The Priory , with its rambling courts and gardens , stood on an island in the river .  The upper stream flowed in a straight artificial channel through the garden , still and broad , towards the Priory mill ; while just above the Priory wall half the river fell over a high weir , with all its appendages of bucks and hatchways , and eel-baskets , into the Nun’s-pool , and then swept round under the ivied walls , with their fantastic turrets and gables , and little loopholed windows , peering out over the stream , as it hurried down over the shallows to join the race below the mill .  A postern door in the walls opened on an ornamental wooden bridge across the weir-head — a favourite haunt of all fishers and sketchers who were admitted to the dragon-guarded Elysium of Whitford Priors .  Thither Lancelot went , congratulating himself , strange to say , in having escaped the only human being whom he loved on earth .  He found on the weir-bridge two of the keepers .  The younger one , Tregarva , was a stately , thoughtful-looking Cornishman , some six feet three in height , with thews and sinews in proportion .  He was sitting on the bridge looking over a basket of eel-lines , and listening silently to the chat of his companion .  Old Harry Verney , the other keeper , was a character in his way , and a very bad character too , though he was a patriarch among all the gamekeepers of the vale .  He was a short , wiry , bandy-legged , ferret-visaged old man , with grizzled hair , and a wizened face tanned brown and purple by constant exposure .  Between rheumatism and constant handling the rod and gun , his fingers were crooked like a hawk’s claws .  He kept his left eye always shut , apparently to save trouble in shooting ; and squinted , and sniffed , and peered , with a stooping back and protruded chin , as if he were perpetually on the watch for fish , flesh , and fowl , vermin and Christian .  The friendship between himself and the Scotch terrier at his heels would have been easily explained by Lessing , for in the transmigration of souls the spirit of Harry Verney had evidently once animated a dog of that breed .  He was dressed in a huge thick fustian jacket , scratched , stained , and patched , with bulging , greasy pockets ; a cast of flies round a battered hat , riddled with shot-holes , a dog-whistle at his button-hole , and an old gun cut short over his arm , bespoke his business .  ‘I seed that ’ere Crawy against Ashy Down Plantations last night , I’ll be sworn , ’ said he , in a squeaking , sneaking tone .  ‘Well , what harm was the man doing ?  ’  ‘Oh , ay , that’s the way you young ’uns talk .  If he warn’t doing mischief , he’d a been glad to have been doing it , I’ll warrant .  If I’d been as young as you , I’d have picked a quarrel with him soon enough , and found a cause for tackling him .  It’s worth a brace of sovereigns with the squire to haul him up .  Eh ?  eh ?  Ain’t old Harry right now ?  ’  ‘Humph !  ’ growled the younger man .  ‘There , then , you get me a snare and a hare by to-morrow night , ’ went on old Harry , ‘and see if I don’t nab him .  It won’t lay long under the plantation afore he picks it up .  You mind to snare me a hare to-night , now !  ’  ‘I’ll do no such thing , nor help to bring fake accusations against any man !  ’  ‘False accusations !  ’ answered Harry , in his cringing way .  ‘Look at that now , for a keeper to say !  Why , if he don’t happen to have a snare just there , he has somewhere else , you know .  Eh ?  Ain’t old Harry right now , eh ?  ’  ‘Maybe.’  ‘There , don’t say I don’t know nothing then .  Eh ?  What matter who put the snare down , or the hare in , perwided he takes it up , man ?  If ’twas his’n he’d be all the better pleased .  The most notoriousest poacher as walks unhung !  ’ And old Harry lifted up his crooked hands in pious indignation .  ‘I’ll have no more gamekeeping , Harry .  What with hunting down Christians as if they were vermin , all night , and being cursed by the squire all day , I’d sooner be a sheriff’s runner , or a negro slave.’  ‘Ay , ay !  that’s the way the young dogs always bark afore they’re broke in , and gets to like it , as the eels does skinning .  Haven’t I bounced pretty near out of my skin many a time afore now , on this here very bridge , with “ Harry , jump in , you stupid hound !  ” and “ Harry , get out , you one-eyed tailor !  ” And then , if one of the gentlemen lost a fish with their clumsiness — Oh , Father !  to hear ’em let out at me and my landing-net , and curse fit to fright the devil !  Dash their sarcy tongues !  Eh !  Don’t old Harry know their ways ?  Don’t he know ’em , now ?  ’  ‘Ay , ’ said the young man , bitterly .  ‘We break the dogs , and we load the guns , and we find the game , and mark the game , — and then they call themselves sportsmen ; we choose the flies , and we bait the spinning-hooks , and we show them where the fish lie , and then when they’ve hooked them , they can’t get them out without us and the spoonnet ; and then they go home to the ladies and boast of the lot of fish they killed — and who thinks of the keeper ?  ’  ‘Oh !  ah !  Then don’t say old Harry knows nothing , then .  How nicely , now , you and I might get a living off this ’ere manor , if the landlords was served like the French ones was .  Eh , Paul ?  ’ chuckled old Harry .  ‘Wouldn’t we pay our taxes with pheasants and grayling , that’s all , eh ?  Ain’t old Harry right now , eh ?  ’  The old fox was fishing for an assent , not for its own sake , for he was a fierce Tory , and would have stood up to be shot at any day , not only for his master’s sake , but for the sake of a single pheasant of his master’s ; but he hated Tregarva for many reasons , and was daily on the watch to entrap him on some of his peculiar points , whereof he had , as we shall find , a good many .  What would have been Tregarva’s answer , I cannot tell ; but Lancelot , who had unintentionally overheard the greater part of the conversation , disliked being any longer a listener , and came close to them .  ‘Here’s your gudgeons and minnows , sir , as you bespoke , ’ quoth Harry ; ‘and here’s that paternoster as you gave me to rig up .  Beautiful minnows , sir , white as a silver spoon .  — They’re the ones now , ain’t they , sir , eh ?  ’  ‘They’ll do !  ’  ‘Well , then , don’t say old Harry don’t know nothing , that’s all , eh ?  ’ and the old fellow toddled off , peering and twisting his head about like a starling .  ‘An odd old fellow that , Tregarva , ’ said Lancelot .  ‘Very , sir , considering who made him , ’ answered the Cornishman , touching his hat , and then thrusting his nose deeper than ever into the eel-basket .  ‘Beautiful stream this , ’ said Lancelot , who had a continual longing — right or wrong — to chat with his inferiors ; and was proportionately sulky and reserved to his superiors .  ‘Beautiful enough , sir , ’ said the keeper , with an emphasis on the first word .  ‘Why , has it any other fault ?  ’  ‘Not so wholesome as pretty , sir.’  ‘What harm does it do ?  ’  ‘Fever , and ague , and rheumatism , sir.’  ‘Where ?  ’ asked Lancelot , a little amused by the man’s laconic answers .  ‘Wherever the white fog spreads , sir.’  ‘Where’s that ?  ’  ‘Everywhere , sir.’  ‘And when ?  ’  ‘Always , sir.’  Lancelot burst out laughing .  The man looked up at him slowly and seriously .  ‘You wouldn’t laugh , sir , if you’d seen much of the inside of these cottages round.’  ‘Really , ’ said Lancelot , ‘I was only laughing at our making such very short work of such a long and serious story .  Do you mean that the unhealthiness of this country is wholly caused by the river ?  ’  ‘No , sir .  The river-damps are God’s sending ; and so they are not too bad to bear .  But there’s more of man’s sending , that is too bad to bear.’  ‘What do you mean ?  ’  ‘Are men likely to be healthy when they are worse housed than a pig ?  ’  ‘No.’  ‘And worse fed than a hound ?  ’  ‘Good heavens !  No !  ’  ‘Or packed together to sleep , like pilchards in a barrel ?  ’  ‘But , my good fellow , do you mean that the labourers here are in that state ?  ’  ‘It isn’t far to walk , sir .  Perhaps some day , when the May-fly is gone off , and the fish won’t rise awhile , you could walk down and see .  I beg your pardon , sir , though , for thinking of such a thing .  They are not places fit for gentlemen , that’s certain.’ There was a staid irony in his tone , which Lancelot felt .  ‘But the clergyman goes ?  ’  ‘Yes , sir.’  ‘And Miss Honoria goes ?  ’  ‘Yes , God Almighty bless her !  ’  ‘And do not they see that all goes right ?  ’  The giant twisted his huge limbs , as if trying to avoid an answer , and yet not daring to do so .  ‘Do clergymen go about among the poor much , sir , at college , before they are ordained ?  ’  Lancelot smiled , and shook his head .  ‘I thought so , sir .  Our good vicar is like the rest hereabouts .  God knows , he stints neither time nor money — the souls of the poor are well looked after , and their bodies too — as far as his purse will go ; but that’s not far.’  ‘Is he ill-off , then ?  ’  ‘The living’s worth some forty pounds a year .  The great tithes , they say , are worth better than twelve hundred ; but Squire Lavington has them.’  ‘Oh , I see !  ’ said Lancelot .  ‘I’m glad you do , sir , for I don’t , ’ meekly answered Tregarva .  ‘But the vicar , sir , he is a kind man , and a good ; but the poor don’t understand him , nor he them .  He is too learned , sir , and , saving your presence , too fond of his prayer-book.’  ‘One can’t be too fond of a good thing.’  ‘Not unless you make an idol of it , sir , and fancy that men’s souls were made for the prayer-book , and not the prayer-book for them.’  ‘But cannot he expose and redress these evils , if they exist ?  ’  Tregarva twisted about again .  ‘I do not say that I think it , sir ; but this I know , that every poor man in the vale thinks it — that the parsons are afraid of the landlords .  They must see these things , for they are not blind ; and they try to plaster them up out of their own pockets.’  ‘But why , in God’s name , don’t they strike at the root of the matter , and go straight to the landlords and tell them the truth ?  ’ asked Lancelot .  ‘So people say , sir .  I see no reason for it except the one which I gave you .  Besides , sir , you must remember , that a man can’t quarrel with his own kin ; and so many of them are their squire’s brothers , or sons , or nephews.’  ‘Or good friends with him , at least.’  ‘Ay , sir , and , to do them justice , they had need , for the poor’s sake , to keep good friends with the squire .  How else are they to get a farthing for schools , or coal-subscriptions , or lying-in societies , or lending libraries , or penny clubs ?  If they spoke their minds to the great ones , sir , how could they keep the parish together ?  ’  ‘You seem to see both sides of a question , certainly .  But what a miserable state of things , that the labouring man should require all these societies , and charities , and helps from the rich !  — that an industrious freeman cannot live without alms !  ’  ‘So I have thought this long time , ’ quietly answered Tregarva .  ‘But Miss Honoria , — she is not afraid to tell her father the truth ?  ’  ‘Suppose , sir , when Adam and Eve were in the garden , that all the devils had come up and played their fiends’ tricks before them , — do you think they’d have seen any shame in it ?  ’  ‘I really cannot tell , ’ said Lancelot , smiling .  ‘Then I can , sir .  They’d have seen no more harm in it than there was harm already in themselves ; and that was none .  A man’s eyes can only see what they’ve learnt to see.’  Lancelot started : it was a favourite dictum of his in Carlyle’s works .  ‘Where did you get that thought , my friend’  ‘By seeing , sir.’  ‘But what has that to do with Miss Honoria ?  ’  ‘She is an angel of holiness herself , sir ; and , therefore , she goes on without blushing or suspecting , where our blood would boil again .  She sees people in want , and thinks it must be so , and pities them and relieves them .  But she don’t know want herself ; and , therefore , she don’t know that it makes men beasts and devils .  She’s as pure as God’s light herself ; and , therefore , she fancies every one is as spotless as she is .  And there’s another mistake in your charitable great people , sir .  When they see poor folk sick or hungry before their eyes , they pull out their purses fast enough , God bless them ; for they wouldn’t like to be so themselves .  But the oppression that goes on all the year round , and the want that goes on all the year round , and the filth , and the lying , and the swearing , and the profligacy , that go on all the year round , and the sickening weight of debt , and the miserable grinding anxiety from rent-day to rent-day , and Saturday night to Saturday night , that crushes a man’s soul down , and drives every thought out of his head but how he is to fill his stomach and warm his back , and keep a house over his head , till he daren’t for his life take his thoughts one moment off the meat that perisheth — oh , sir , they never felt this ; and , therefore , they never dream that there are thousands who pass them in their daily walks who feel this , and feel nothing else !  ’  This outburst was uttered with an earnestness and majesty which astonished Lancelot .  He forgot the subject in the speaker .  ‘You are a very extraordinary gamekeeper !  ’ said he .  ‘When the Lord shows a man a thing , he can’t well help seeing it , ’ answered Tregarva , in his usual staid tone .  There was a pause .  The keeper looked at him with a glance , before which Lancelot’s eyes fell .  ‘Hell is paved with hearsays , sir , and as all this talk of mine is hearsay , if you are in earnest , sir , go and see for yourself .  I know you have a kind heart , and they tell me that you are a great scholar , which would to God I was !  so you ought not to condescend to take my word for anything which you can look into yourself ; ’ with which sound piece of common-sense Tregarva returned busily to his eel-lines .  ‘Hand me the rod and can , and help me out along the buck-stage , ’ said Lancelot ; ‘I must have some more talk with you , my fine fellow.’  ‘Amen , ’ answered Tregarva , as he assisted our lame hero along a huge beam which stretched out into the pool ; and having settled him there , returned mechanically to his work , humming a Wesleyan hymn-tune .  Lancelot sat and tried to catch perch , but Tregarva’s words haunted him .  He lighted his cigar , and tried to think earnestly over the matter , but he had got into the wrong place for thinking .  All his thoughts , all his sympathies , were drowned in the rush and whirl of the water .  He forgot everything else in the mere animal enjoyment of sight and sound .  Like many young men at his crisis of life , he had given himself up to the mere contemplation of Nature till he had become her slave ; and now a luscious scene , a singing bird , were enough to allure his mind away from the most earnest and awful thoughts .  He tried to think , but the river would not let him .  It thundered and spouted out behind him from the hatches , and leapt madly past him , and caught his eyes in spite of him , and swept them away down its dancing waves , and let them go again only to sweep them down again and again , till his brain felt a delicious dizziness from the everlasting rush and the everlasting roar .  And then below , how it spread , and writhed , and whirled into transparent fans , hissing and twining snakes , polished glass-wreaths , huge crystal bells , which boiled up from the bottom , and dived again beneath long threads of creamy foam , and swung round posts and roots , and rushed blackening under dark weed-fringed boughs , and gnawed at the marly banks , and shook the ever-restless bulrushes , till it was swept away and down over the white pebbles and olive weeds , in one broad rippling sheet of molten silver , towards the distant sea .  Downwards it fleeted ever , and bore his thoughts floating on its oily stream ; and the great trout , with their yellow sides and peacock backs , lounged among the eddies , and the silver grayling dimpled and wandered upon the shallows , and the may-flies flickered and rustled round him like water fairies , with their green gauzy wings ; the coot clanked musically among the reeds ; the frogs hummed their ceaseless vesper-monotone ; the kingfisher darted from his hole in the bank like a blue spark of electric light ; the swallows’ bills snapped as they twined and hawked above the pool ; the swift’s wings whirred like musket-balls , as they rushed screaming past his head ; and ever the river fleeted by , bearing his eyes away down the current , till its wild eddies began to glow with crimson beneath the setting sun .  The complex harmony of sights and sounds slid softly over his soul , and he sank away into a still daydream , too passive for imagination , too deep for meditation , and  ‘Beauty born of murmuring sound , Did pass into his face.’  Blame him not .  There are more things in a man’s heart than ever get in through his thoughts .  On a sudden , a soft voice behind him startled him .  ‘Can a poor cockney artist venture himself along this timber without falling in ?  ’  Lancelot turned .  ‘Come out to me , and if you stumble , the naiads will rise out of their depths , and “ hold up their pearled wrists ” to save their favourite.’  The artist walked timidly out along the beams , and sat down beside Lancelot , who shook him warmly by the hand .  ‘Welcome , Claude Mellot , and all lovely enthusiasms and symbolisms !  Expound to me , now , the meaning of that water-lily leaf and its grand simple curve , as it lies sleeping there in the back eddy.’  ‘Oh , I am too amused to philosophise .  The fair Argemone has just been treating me to her three hundred and sixty-fifth philippic against my unoffending beard.’  ‘Why , what fault can she find with such a graceful and natural ornament ?  ’  ‘Just this , my dear fellow , that it is natural .  As it is , she considers me only “ intelligent-looking .  ” If the beard were away , my face , she says , would be “ so refined !  ” And , I suppose , if I was just a little more effeminate and pale , with a nice retreating under-jaw and a drooping lip , and a meek , peaking simper , like your starved Romish saints , I should be “ so spiritual !  ” And if , again , to complete the climax , I did but shave my head like a Chinese , I should be a model for St. Francis himself !  ’  ‘But really , after all , why make yourself so singular by this said beard ?  ’  ‘I wear it for a testimony and a sign that a man has no right to be ashamed of the mark of manhood .  Oh , that one or two of your Protestant clergymen , who ought to be perfect ideal men , would have the courage to get up into the pulpit in a long beard , and testify that the very essential idea of Protestantism is the dignity and divinity of man as God made him !  Our forefathers were not ashamed of their beards ; but now even the soldier is only allowed to keep his moustache , while our quill-driving masses shave themselves as close as they can ; and in proportion to a man’s piety he wears less hair , from the young curate who shaves off his whiskers , to the Popish priest who shaves his crown !  ’  ‘What do you say , then , to cutting off nuns’ hair ?  ’  ‘I say , that extremes meet , and prudish Manichæism always ends in sheer indecency .  Those Papists have forgotten what woman was made for , and therefore , they have forgotten that a woman’s hair is her glory , for it was given to her for a covering : as says your friend , Paul the Hebrew , who , by the bye , had as fine theories of art as he had of society , if he had only lived fifteen hundred years later , and had a chance of working them out.’  ‘How remarkably orthodox you are !  ’ said Lancelot , smiling .  ‘How do you know that I am not ?  You never heard me deny the old creed .  But what if an artist ought to be of all creeds at once ?  My business is to represent the beautiful , and therefore to accept it wherever I find it .  Yours is to be a philosopher , and find the true.’  ‘But the beautiful must be truly beautiful to be worth anything ; and so you , too , must search for the true.’  ‘Yes ; truth of form , colour , chiaroscuro .  They are worthy to occupy me a life ; for they are eternal — or at least that which they express : and if I am to get at the symbolised unseen , it must be through the beauty of the symbolising phenomenon .  If I , who live by art , for art , in art , or you either , who seem as much a born artist as myself , am to have a religion , it must be a worship of the fountain of art — of the  “ Spirit of beauty , who doth consecrate With his own hues whate’er he shines upon .  ” ’  ‘As poor Shelley has it ; and much peace of mind it gave him !  ’ answered Lancelot .  ‘I have grown sick lately of such dreary tinsel abstractions .  When you look through the glitter of the words , your “ spirit of beauty ” simply means certain shapes and colours which please you in beautiful things and in beautiful people.’  ‘Vile nominalist !  renegade from the ideal and all its glories !  ’ said Claude , laughing .  ‘I don’t care sixpence now for the ideal !  I want not beauty , but some beautiful thing — a woman perhaps , ’ and he sighed .  ‘But at least a person — a living , loving person — all lovely itself , and giving loveliness to all things !  If I must have an ideal , let it be , for mercy’s sake , a realised one.’  Claude opened his sketch-book .  ‘We shall get swamped in these metaphysical oceans , my dear dreamer .  But lo , here come a couple , as near ideals as any in these degenerate days — the two poles of beauty : the milieu of which would be Venus with us Pagans , or the Virgin Mary with the Catholics .  Look at them !  Honoria the dark — symbolic of passionate depth ; Argemone the fair , type of intellectual light !  Oh , that I were a Zeuxis to unite them instead of having to paint them in two separate pictures , and split perfection in half , as everything is split in this piecemeal world !  ’  ‘You will have the honour of a sitting this afternoon , I suppose , from both beauties ?  ’  ‘I hope so , for my own sake .  There is no path left to immortality , or bread either , now for us poor artists but portrait-painting.’  ‘I envy you your path , when it leads through such Elysiums , ’ said Lancelot .  ‘Come here , gentlemen both !  ’ cried Argemone from the bridge .  ‘Fairly caught !  ’ grumbled Lancelot .  ‘You must go , at least ; my lameness will excuse me , I hope.’  The two ladies were accompanied by Bracebridge , a gazelle which he had given Argemone , and a certain miserable cur of Honoria’s adopting , who plays an important part in this story , and , therefore , deserves a little notice .  Honoria had rescued him from a watery death in the village pond , by means of the colonel , who had revenged himself for a pair of wet feet by utterly corrupting the dog’s morals , and teaching him every week to answer to some fresh scandalous name .  But Lancelot was not to escape .  Instead of moving on , as he had hoped , the party stood looking over the bridge , and talking — he took for granted , poor thin-skinned fellow — of him .  And for once his suspicions were right ; for he overheard Argemone say —  ‘I wonder how Mr. Smith can be so rude as to sit there in my presence over his stupid perch !  Smoking those horrid cigars , too !  How selfish those field-sports do make men !  ’  ‘Thank you !  ’ said the colonel , with a low bow .  Lancelot rose .  ‘If a country girl , now , had spoken in that tone , ’ said he to himself , ‘it would have been called at least “ saucy ” — but Mammon’s elect ones may do anything .  Well — here I come , limping to my new tyrant’s feet , like Goethe’s bear to Lili’s.’  She drew him away , as women only know how , from the rest of the party , who were chatting and laughing with Claude .  She had shown off her fancied indifference to Lancelot before them , and now began in a softer voice —  ‘Why will you be so shy and lonely , Mr. Smith ?  ’  ‘Because I am not fit for your society.’  ‘Who tells you so ?  Why will you not become so ?  ’  Lancelot hung down his head .  ‘As long as fish and game are your only society , you will become more and more morne and self-absorbed.’  ‘Really fish were the last things of which I was thinking when you came .  My whole heart was filled with the beauty of nature , and nothing else.’  There was an opening for one of Argemone’s preconcerted orations .  ‘Had you no better occupation , ’ she said gently , ‘than nature , the first day of returning to the open air after so frightful and dangerous an accident ?  Were there no thanks due to One above ?  ’  Lancelot understood her .  ‘How do you know that I was not even then showing my thankfulness ?  ’  ‘What !  with a cigar and a fishing-rod ?  ’  ‘Certainly .  Why not ?  ’  Argemone really could not tell at the moment .  The answer upset her scheme entirely .  ‘Might not that very admiration of nature have been an act of worship ?  ’ continued our hero .  ‘How can we better glorify the worker than by delighting in his work ?  ’  ‘Ah !  ’ sighed the lady , ‘why trust to these self-willed methods , and neglect the noble and exquisite forms which the Church has prepared for us as embodiments for every feeling of our hearts ?  ’  ‘ Every feeling , Miss Lavington ?  ’  Argemone hesitated .  She had made the good old stock assertion , as in duty bound ; but she could not help recollecting that there were several Popish books of devotion at that moment on her table , which seemed to her to patch a gap or two in the Prayer-book .  ‘My temple as yet , ’ said Lancelot , ‘is only the heaven and the earth ; my church-music I can hear all day long , whenever I have the sense to be silent , and “ hear my mother sing ; ” my priests and preachers are every bird and bee , every flower and cloud .  Am I not well enough furnished ?  Do you want to reduce my circular infinite chapel to an oblong hundred-foot one ?  My sphere harmonies to the Gregorian tones in four parts ?  My world-wide priesthood , with their endless variety of costume , to one not over-educated gentleman in a white sheet ?  And my dreams of naiads and flower-fairies , and the blue-bells ringing God’s praises , as they do in “ The story without an End , ” for the gross reality of naughty charity children , with their pockets full of apples , bawling out Hebrew psalms of which they neither feel nor understand a word ?  ’  Argemone tried to look very much shocked at this piece of bombast .  Lancelot evidently meant it as such , but he eyed her all the while as if there was solemn earnest under the surface .  ‘Oh , Mr. Smith !  ’ she said , ‘how can you dare talk so of a liturgy compiled by the wisest and holiest of all countries and ages !  You revile that of whose beauty you are not qualified to judge !  ’  ‘There must be a beauty in it all , or such as you are would not love it.’  ‘Oh , ’ she said hopefully , ‘that you would but try the Church system !  How you would find it harmonise and methodise every day , every thought for you !  But I cannot explain myself .  Why not go to our vicar and open your doubts to him ?  ’  ‘Pardon , but you must excuse me.’  ‘Why ?  He is one of the saintliest of men !  ’  ‘To tell the truth , I have been to him already.’  ‘You do not mean it !  And what did he tell you ?  ’  ‘What the rest of the world does — hearsays.’  ‘But did you not find him most kind ?  ’  ‘I went to him to be comforted and guided .  He received me as a criminal .  He told me that my first duty was penitence ; that as long as I lived the life I did , he could not dare to cast his pearls before swine by answering my doubts ; that I was in a state incapable of appreciating spiritual truths ; and , therefore , he had no right to tell me any.’  ‘And what did he tell you ?  ’  ‘Several spiritual lies instead , I thought .  He told me , hearing me quote Schiller , to beware of the Germans , for they were all Pantheists at heart .  I asked him whether he included Lange and Bunsen , and it appeared that he had never read a German book in his life .  He then flew furiously at Mr. Carlyle , and I found that all he knew of him was from a certain review in the Quarterly .  He called Boehmen a theosophic Atheist .  I should have burst out at that , had I not read the very words in a High Church review the day before , and hoped that he was not aware of the impudent falsehood which he was retailing .  Whenever I feebly interposed an objection to anything he said ( for , after all , he talked on ) , he told me to hear the Catholic Church .  I asked him which Catholic Church ?  He said the English .  I asked him whether it was to be the Church of the sixth century , or the thirteenth , or the seventeenth or the eighteenth ?  He told me the one and eternal Church which belonged as much to the nineteenth century as to the first .  I begged to know whether , then , I was to hear the Church according to Simeon , or according to Newman , or according to St. Paul ; for they seemed to me a little at variance ?  He told me , austerely enough , that the mind of the Church was embodied in her Liturgy and Articles .  To which I answered , that the mind of the episcopal clergy might , perhaps , be ; but , then , how happened it that they were always quarrelling and calling hard names about the sense of those very documents ?  And so I left him , assuring him that , living in the nineteenth century , I wanted to hear the Church of the nineteenth century , and no other ; and should be most happy to listen to her , as soon as she had made up her mind what to say.’  Argemone was angry and disappointed .  She felt she could not cope with Lancelot’s quaint logic , which , however unsound , cut deeper into questions than she had yet looked for herself .  Somehow , too , she was tongue-tied before him just when she wanted to be most eloquent in behalf of her principles ; and that fretted her still more .  But his manner puzzled her most of all .  First he would run on with his face turned away , as if soliloquising out into the air , and then suddenly look round at her with most fascinating humility ; and , then , in a moment , a dark shade would pass over his countenance , and he would look like one possessed , and his lips wreathe in a sinister artificial smile , and his wild eyes glare through and through her with such cunning understanding of himself and her , that , for the first time in her life , she quailed and felt frightened , as if in the power of a madman .  She turned hastily away to shake off the spell .  He sprang after her , almost on his knees , and looked up into her beautiful face with an imploring cry .  ‘What , do you , too , throw me off ?  Will you , too , treat the poor wild uneducated sportsman as a Pariah and an outcast , because he is not ashamed to be a man ?  — because he cannot stuff his soul’s hunger with cut-and-dried hearsays , but dares to think for himself ?  — because he wants to believe things , and dare not be satisfied with only believing that he ought to believe them ?  ’  She paused , astonished .  ‘Ah , yes , ’ he went on , ‘I hoped too much !  What right had I to expect that you would understand me ?  What right , still more , to expect that you would stoop , any more than the rest of the world , to speak to me , as if I could become anything better than the wild hog I seem ?  Oh yes !  — the chrysalis has no butterfly in it , of course !  Stamp on the ugly motionless thing !  And yet — you look so beautiful and good !  — are all my dreams to perish , about the Alrunen and prophet-maidens , how they charmed our old fighting , hunting forefathers into purity and sweet obedience among their Saxon forests ?  Has woman forgotten her mission — to look at the heart and have mercy , while cold man looks at the act and condemns ?  Do you , too , like the rest of mankind , think no-belief better than misbelief ; and smile on hypocrisy , lip-assent , practical Atheism , sooner than on the unpardonable sin of making a mistake ?  Will you , like the rest of this wise world , let a man’s spirit rot asleep into the pit , if he will only lie quiet and not disturb your smooth respectabilities ; but if he dares , in waking , to yawn in an unorthodox manner , knock him on the head at once , and “ break the bruised reed , ” and “ quench the smoking flax ” ?  And yet you churchgoers have “ renounced the world ” !  ’  ‘What do you want , in Heaven’s name ?  ’ asked Argemone , half terrified .  ‘I want you to tell me that .  Here I am , with youth , health , strength , money , every blessing of life but one ; and I am utterly miserable .  I want some one to tell me what I want.’  ‘Is it not that you want — religion ?  ’  ‘I see hundreds who have what you call religion , with whom I should scorn to change my irreligion.’  ‘But , Mr. Smith , are you not — are you not wicked ?  — They tell me so , ’ said Argemone , with an effort , ‘And is that not the cause of your disease ?  ’  Lancelot laughed .  ‘No , fairest prophetess , it is the disease itself .  “ Why am I what I am , when I know more and more daily what I could be ?  ” — That is the mystery ; and my sins are the fruit , and not the root of it .  Who will explain that ?  ’  Argemone began , —  ‘The Church — ’  ‘Oh , Miss Lavington , ’ cried he , impatiently , ‘will you , too , send me back to that cold abstraction ?  I came to you , however presumptuous , for living , human advice to a living , human heart ; and will you pass off on me that Proteus-dream the Church , which in every man’s mouth has a different meaning ?  In one book , meaning a method of education , only it has never been carried out ; in another , a system of polity , — only it has never been realised ; — now a set of words written in books , on whose meaning all are divided ; now a body of men who are daily excommunicating each other as heretics and apostates ; now a universal idea ; now the narrowest and most exclusive of all parties .  Really , before you ask me to hear the Church , I have a right to ask you to define what the Church is.’  ‘Our Articles define it , ’ said Argemone drily .  ‘The “ Visible Church , ” at least , it defines as “ a company of faithful men , in which , ” etc. But how does it define the “ Invisible ” one ?