strict
method, to astronomy and music, it should have concluded that work, and
therewith the second period of the life of its author, by drawing tight
together the threads of a long and intricate argument. In effect
however, it began, or, in perturbed manner, and as [144] with throes of
childbirth, seemed the preparation for, an argument of an entirely new
and disparate species, such as would demand a new period of life also,
if it might be, for its due expansion.

But with what confusion, what baffling inequalities! How afflicting to
the mind's eye! It was a veritable "solar storm"--this illumination,
which had burst at the last moment upon the strenuous, self-possessed,
much-honoured monastic student, as he sat down peacefully to write the
last formal chapters of his work ere he betook himself to its
well-earned practical reward as superior, with lordship and mitre and
ring, of the abbey whose music and calendar his mathematical knowledge
had qualified him to reform. The very shape of Volume Twelve, pieced
together of quite irregularly formed pages, was a solecism. It could
never be bound. In truth, the man himself, and what passed with him in
one particular space of time, had invaded a matter, which is nothing if
not entirely abstract and impersonal. Indirectly the volume was the
record of an episode, an interlude, an interpolated page of life. And
whereas in the earlier volumes you found by way of illustration no more
than the simplest indispensable diagrams, the scribe's hand had strayed
here into mazy borders, long spaces of hieroglyph, and as it were
veritable pictures of the theoretic elements of his subject. Soft
wintry auroras seemed to play behind whole pages of crabbed textual
writing, line and figure [145] bending, breathing, flaming, in, to
lovely "arrangements" that were like music made visible; till writing
and writer changed suddenly, "to one thing constant never," after the
known manner of madmen in such work. Finally, the whole matter broke
off with an unfinished word, as a later hand testified, adding the date
of the author's death, "deliquio animi."

He had been brought to the monastery as a little child; was bred there;
had never yet left it, busy and satisfied through youth and early
manhood; was grown almost as necessary a part of the community as the
stones of its material abode, as a pillar of the great tower he
ascended to watch the movement of the stars. The structure of a
forti