rs of learning and literature was to be
distinguished any predominant tone, perhaps the kindliest favor had been
extended toward the more unfamiliar and fantastic quartos of the
seventeenth century, those speculative compendiums of lore that though
enriched by the classic Renaissance were nevertheless more truly the
eclectic consummation of the Middle Ages. The base of their thought may
have been unsubstantial, a mirage of philosophy, offering but a
Neo-Platonic or Gnostic kaleidoscope through which to survey the
universe; but so rich were their tinctures and apparels, so diverse was
the pattern of their ceremonious commentary, and so sonorous was their
euphony that Michael made of their reading a sanctuary where every night
for a while he dreamed upon their cadences resounding through a world of
polychromatic images and recondite jewels, of spiritual maladies and
minatory comets, of potions for revenge and love, of talismans, to
fortune, touchstones of treasure and eternal life, and strange
influential herbs. Mere words came to possess Michael so perilously that
under the spell of these Jacobeans he grew half contemptuous of thought
less prodigally ornate. The vital ideas of the present danced by in
thin-winged progress unperceived, or rather perceived as bloodless and
irresolute ephemerides. When people reproached him for his willful
prejudice, he pointed out how easy it would always be to overtake the
ideas of the present and how much waste of intellectual breath would be
avoided by letting his three or four Oxford years account for the most
immediately evanescent. Oxford seemed to him to provide an opportunity,
and more than an opportunity--an inexpugnable command to wave with most
reluctant hands farewell to the backward of time, around whose brink
rose up more truthful dreams than those that floated indeterminate,
beckoning through the mist across the wan mountains of the future.

On the walls Michael's pictures had been collected to achieve through
another medium the effect of his books. Mona Lisa was there not for her
lips or eyes, but rather for that labyrinth of rocks and streams behind;
and since pictures seldom could be found to provide what he sought in a
picture, there were very few of them in his sitting-room. One hour of
the Anatomy of Melancholy or of Urn Burial could always transform the
pattern of the terra-cotta wall paper to some diagrammatic significance.
Apart from the accumulation of books and pic