iled upon the fingers of the
Norns.

* * * * *

Such in its broader outlines seemed the infirmity which had grown with
my growth, and now had to be reckoned with, like the bridle of Theages,
as a permanent hindrance to a reasonable happiness. Old hopes lay
shattered about me--well, I had to pick up the fragments and piece
together a less ambitious ideal.

I will not linger over the forces which helped my resolution, the great
and general remedies which come to the relief of men in like evil case.
Religion, philosophy, art, science, literature--all promised their
anodynes against despair; slowly they stirred in me anew those springs
of interest in life which disillusion seemed to have choked for ever. I
rose up, and looking round upon the world saw that it was still good;
and there came into my memory brave words which a golden book puts in
the mouths of its indomitable knights: "I will take the adventure which
God shall ordain me." I now perceived that if evil fortune had unhorsed
me it had yet left me endurance to continue the combat on foot. My
second failure was more final and disastrous than the first discomfiture
in earlier life, but now the plague of pessimism was stayed by a
greater recuperative power. Those long hours of the long eastern day,
spent under the verandah with books of many ages and languages, had not
been altogether fruitless; they had helped to mature a wider and more
catholic taste than that of restless youth, the kind of culture that
brings not rebellion but peace.

In my eastern watch-tower I had re-read the great books from a new point
of vantage, and let the eye roam over fields of literature which lie
beyond the undergraduate's bounds; by a still permeation of fine
influence, my crude philosophy was unconsciously mellowed, as the
surface of ivory, according to Roman belief, by the bland air of Tibur.
For by the mere being in an atmosphere of serenity our nature grows
porous to gracious influences streaming in we know not how or when, and
taking their abode in our very grain and structure. And so without
consciousness of good desert, I found myself confident in a new
discipline, and looking for the word of command from wiser leaders than
Byron or the youthful Shelley. Queen Mab was now the saddest rhetoric,
and Childe Harold's plaint unseemly lamentation; I had erased from my
calendar of saints the names of apostles of affliction once held in
honour; the Cal