vexed his spirit was a
far more secret and subtle distortion of liberty. It was the rule of
conventionality that he desired to destroy, the appetite for luxury,
and power, and excitement, and strong sensation. He would have liked
to do something to win men back to the joys that were within the reach
of all, the joys of peaceful work, and simplicity, and friendship, and
quiet hopefulness. These were what seemed to Hugh to be the staple of
life, and to be within the reach of so many people. And yet he had no
mission. He could only detest the loud voices of the world and its
feverish excitements, with all his heart; and on the other hand he
loved with increasing contentment the gentler and beautiful background
of life, that enacted itself every day in garden and field and wood;
the quiet waiting things, the old church seen over orchards and
cottage-roofs, the deep pool in the reedy river, dreaming its own quiet
dreams, whatever passed in the noisy world. He was sure that those
things would bring peace to many weary spirits, if they could but learn
to love them.

Artists and musicians, Hugh felt, were the happiest of all people; for
they made the beautiful thing that might stand by itself, without need
of comment. The graceful boy or girl that they painted, undimmed by
age and evil experience, looked down at you from the canvas with a pure
and radiant smile, and became as it were a spring of clear water, where
a soul might bathe and be clean. Or the picture of some silent
woodland place, some lilied pool on a golden summer afternoon--how the
peace of it came into the spirit, how it seemed to assure the heart
that God loved beauty best, lavishing it with an unwearied hand, even
where there could be none to behold it but Himself! Then the
musician,--how he wove the airy stuff of sound, so that the pathos of
the world, its heavy mysteries, its sunlit joys, started into life,
embracing the soul, and bidding it not be faithless or blind. These
were the pure gifts of art, the spells before which the dull
conventions of the world, its noise and dust, crumbled into the ugly
ashes that they really were.

Beside those magical secrets the clumsy art of the writer stood
abashed. Those tints, those notes were such definite things; but in
the grosser and more tainted medium with which writers dealt, where so
much depended upon association and point of view, there was so much
less certainty of producing the effect intended, t