meant to pass for milk,
and it had already occurred to him that books were stuff, and that life
was stupid. His school studies had not much modified that opinion, for
though he "did" his classics and mathematics, he was not pre-eminent in
them. It was said of him, that Lydgate could do anything he liked, but
he had certainly not yet liked to do anything remarkable. He was a
vigorous animal with a ready understanding, but no spark had yet
kindled in him an intellectual passion; knowledge seemed to him a very
superficial affair, easily mastered: judging from the conversation of
his elders, he had apparently got already more than was necessary for
mature life. Probably this was not an exceptional result of expensive
teaching at that period of short-waisted coats, and other fashions
which have not yet recurred. But, one vacation, a wet day sent him to
the small home library to hunt once more for a book which might have
some freshness for him: in vain! unless, indeed, he took down a dusty
row of volumes with gray-paper backs and dingy labels--the volumes of
an old Cyclopaedia which he had never disturbed. It would at least be
a novelty to disturb them. They were on the highest shelf, and he
stood on a chair to get them down. But he opened the volume which he
first took from the shelf: somehow, one is apt to read in a makeshift
attitude, just where it might seem inconvenient to do so. The page he
opened on was under the head of Anatomy, and the first passage that
drew his eyes was on the valves of the heart. He was not much
acquainted with valves of any sort, but he knew that valvae were
folding-doors, and through this crevice came a sudden light startling
him with his first vivid notion of finely adjusted mechanism in the
human frame. A liberal education had of course left him free to read
the indecent passages in the school classics, but beyond a general
sense of secrecy and obscenity in connection with his internal
structure, had left his imagination quite unbiassed, so that for
anything he knew his brains lay in small bags at his temples, and he
had no more thought of representing to himself how his blood circulated
than how paper served instead of gold. But the moment of vocation had
come, and before he got down from his chair, the world was made new to
him by a presentiment of endless processes filling the vast spaces
planked out of his sight by that wordy ignorance which he had supposed
to be knowledge. Fro