ings in vain against the
constraining threads. From what other free and spacious country was it
exiled? What other place did it turn to with desire and love? It
seemed to him to-day that he was a captive in a strange land,
remembering some distant home, some heavenly Zion, even in his mirth.
It seemed to him as if the memory of some gracious place dwelt in his
mind, separated only from his earthly memory by a thin yet impenetrable
veil. His spirit held out listless hands of entreaty to some unseen
power, desiring he knew not what. To-day on earth the desire of all
created things seemed to be directed to each other. The tiny creeping
sprays of delicate plants that carpeted the wood seemed to interlace
with one another in tender embraces. In loneliness they had slept
beneath the dark ground, and now that they had risen to the light, they
seemed to thrill with joy to find themselves alone no longer. He saw
in the leafless branches of a tree near him two doves, with white rings
upon their necks, that turned to each other with looks of desire and
love. Was it for some kindred spirit, for the sweet consent of some
desirous heart that Hugh hankered? No! it was not that! It was rather
for some unimagined freedom, some perfect tranquillity that he yearned.
It was like the desire of the stranded boat for the motion and dip of
the blue sea-billows. He would have hoisted the sail of his thought,
have left the world behind, steering out across the hissing, leaping
seas, till he should see at last the shadowy summits, the green coves
of some remote land, draw near across the azure sea-line. To-day the
fretful and poisonous ambitions of the world seemed alien and
intolerable to him. As the dweller in wide fields sees the smoke of
the distant town rise in a shadowy arc upon the horizon, and thinks
with pity of the toilers there in the hot streets, so Hugh thought of
the intricate movement of life as of a thing that was both remote and
insupportable. That world where one jostled and strove, where one made
so many unwilling mistakes, where one laboured so unprofitably, was it
not, after all, an ugly place? What seemed so strange to him was that
one should be set so unerringly in the middle of it, while at the same
time one was given the sense of its unreality, its distastefulness. So
marvellously was one made that one sickened at its contact, and yet, if
one separated oneself from it, one drooped and languished in a morbid