ossible to bestow this sense of intellectual beauty? With
what earnestness he made the endeavour! He took sweet passages of prose
and verse, and read them with all the feeling and skill he could
command. 'Do you yield to that?' he said within himself as he looked
from face to face. 'Are your ears hopelessly sealed, your minds
immutably earthen?' Grail--Oh yes, Grail had the right intelligence in
his eyes; but Ackroyd, but Bunce? Ackroyd thought of the meaning of the
words; no more. Poor Bunce had darkling throes of mind, but struggled
with desperate nervousness and could not be at ease till the
straightforward talk began again. And Bower?--Nay, there goes more to
this matter than mere enthusiasm in a teacher. Who had instructed
Gilbert Grail to discern the grace of the written word? On the other
hand, it was doubtful whether Walter Egremont, left to himself in the
home of his good plain father, would have felt what now he did. The
soil was there, but how much do we not owe to tillage. Read what
Egremont on one occasion read to these men:

'"He beginneth not with obscure definitions, which must blur the
margins with interpretations and load the memory with doubtfulness: but
he cometh to you with words set in delightful proportion, either
accompanied with or prepared for the well-enchanting skill of music and
with a tale forsooth he cometh unto you--with a tale which holdeth
children from play, and old men from the chimney-corner."'

What were _that_ to you, save for the glow of memory fed with incense
of the poets?--save for innumerable dear associations, only possible to
the instructed, which make the finer part of your intellectual being?
Walter was attempting too much, and soon became painfully conscious of
it.

He came to the dramatists, and human interest thenceforth helped him.
He could read well, and a scene from those giants of the prime had
efficiency even with Bower. Hope revived in the lecturer.

To-night he was less happy than usual, for what reason he could not
himself understand. His thoughts wandered, sometimes to Eastbourne,
sometimes to Ullswater; yet he was speaking of Shakespeare. Bower was
more owl-eyed than usual; the five doubtful hearers obviously felt the
time long. Only Grail gave an unfailing ear. Egremont closed with a
sense of depression.

Would Bower come and pester him with fatuous questions and remarks? No;
Bower turned away and reached his hat from the peg. The doubtful five
took dow