ly read, the lines on "The Arve at Cluse,"
on "Mont Blanc," and "The Glacier," should not be passed over as merely
rhetorical. And the reflections on the loungers at Conflans ("Why Stand
ye here all the Day Idle?") are full of the spirit in which he was
gradually approaching the great problems of his life, to pass through
art into the earnest study of human conduct and its final cause.

He was still deeply religious--more deeply so than before, and found the
echo of his own thoughts in George Herbert, with whom he "communed in
spirit" while he travelled through the Alps. But the forms of outward
religion were losing their hold over him in proportion as his inward
religion became more real and intense. It was only a few days after
writing these lines that he "broke the Sabbath" for the first time in
his life, by climbing a hill after church. That was the first shot fired
in a war, in one of the strangest and saddest wars between conscience
and reason that biography records; strange because the opposing forces
were so nearly matched, and sad because the struggle lasted until their
field of battle was desolated before either won a victory.

Later on we have to tell how he dwelt in Doubting Castle, and how he
escaped. But the pilgrim had not yet met Giant Despair; and his progress
was very pleasant in that spring of 1845, the year of fine weather, as
he drove round the Riviera, and the cities of Tuscany opened out their
treasures to him. There was Lucca, with San Frediano and the glories of
Romanesque architecture; Fra Bartolommeo's picture of the Madonna with
the Magdalen and St. Catherine of Siena, his initiation into the
significance of early religious painting: and, taking hold of his
imagination, in her marble sleep, more powerfully than any flesh and
blood, the dead lady of St. Martin's Church, Ilaria di Caretto. There
was Pisa, with the Campo Santo and the jewel shrine of Sta. Maria della
Spina, then undestroyed; the excitement of street sketching among a
sympathetic crowd of fraternizing Italians; the Abbe Rosini, Professor
of Fine Arts, whom he made friends with, endured as lecturer, and
persuaded into scaffold-building in the Campo Santo for study of the
frescoes. And there was Florence, with Giotto's campanile and Santa
Maria Novella, where the young Protestant frequented monasteries, made
hay with monks, sketched with his new-found friends Rudolf Durheim of
Berne and Dieudonne the French purist; and spent long d