seem to
reflect life in a diseased dream. But these kinds of inspiration
Lydgate regarded as rather vulgar and vinous compared with the
imagination that reveals subtle actions inaccessible by any sort of
lens, but tracked in that outer darkness through long pathways of
necessary sequence by the inward light which is the last refinement of
Energy, capable of bathing even the ethereal atoms in its ideally
illuminated space. He for his part had tossed away all cheap
inventions where ignorance finds itself able and at ease: he was
enamoured of that arduous invention which is the very eye of research,
provisionally framing its object and correcting it to more and more
exactness of relation; he wanted to pierce the obscurity of those
minute processes which prepare human misery and joy, those invisible
thoroughfares which are the first lurking-places of anguish, mania, and
crime, that delicate poise and transition which determine the growth of
happy or unhappy consciousness.

As he threw down his book, stretched his legs towards the embers in the
grate, and clasped his hands at the back of his head, in that agreeable
afterglow of excitement when thought lapses from examination of a
specific object into a suffusive sense of its connections with all the
rest of our existence--seems, as it were, to throw itself on its back
after vigorous swimming and float with the repose of unexhausted
strength--Lydgate felt a triumphant delight in his studies, and
something like pity for those less lucky men who were not of his
profession.

"If I had not taken that turn when I was a lad," he thought, "I might
have got into some stupid draught-horse work or other, and lived always
in blinkers. I should never have been happy in any profession that did
not call forth the highest intellectual strain, and yet keep me in good
warm contact with my neighbors. There is nothing like the medical
profession for that: one can have the exclusive scientific life that
touches the distance and befriend the old fogies in the parish too. It
is rather harder for a clergyman: Farebrother seems to be an anomaly."

This last thought brought back the Vincys and all the pictures of the
evening. They floated in his mind agreeably enough, and as he took up
his bed-candle his lips were curled with that incipient smile which is
apt to accompany agreeable recollections. He was an ardent fellow, but
at present his ardor was absorbed in love of his work and in the