at complicated world.
That world was now hushed in sleep. But the weir rushed and plunged in
the night outside; and over the dark trees that fringed the stream
there was a tender and patient light, that stole up from the rim of the
whirling globe, as it turned its weary sides, with punctual obedience,
to the burning light of the remote sun.

XXXII

Classical Education--Mental Discipline--Mental
Fertilisation--Poetry--The August Soul--The Secret of a Star--The Voice
of the Soul--Choice Studies--Alere Flammam

Hugh found that, as he grew older, he tended to read less, or rather
that he tended to recur more and more to the familiar books. He had
always been a rapid reader, and had followed the line of pure pleasure,
rather than pursued any scheme of self-improvement. He became aware,
particularly at Cambridge, that he was by no means a well-informed man,
and that his mind was very incompletely furnished. He was disposed to
blame his education for this, to a certain extent; it had been almost
purely classical; he had been taught a little science, a little
mathematics, and a little French; but the only history he had done at
school had been ancient history, to illustrate the classical authors he
had been reading; and the result had been a want of mental balance; he
knew nothing of the modern world or the movement of European history;
the whole education had in fact been linguistic and literary; it had
sacrificed everything to accuracy, and to the consideration of niceties
of expression. It might have been urged that this was in itself a
training in the art of verbal expression; but here it seemed to Hugh
that the whole of the training had confined itself to the momentary
effect, the ring of sentences, the adjustment of epithets, and that he
had received no sort of training in the art of structure. He had never
been made to write essays or to arrange his materials. He thought that
he ought to have been taught how to deal with a subject; but his
exercises had been almost wholly translations from ancient classical
languages. He had been taught, in fact, how to manipulate texture, but
never how to frame a design. The result upon his reading had been that
he had always been in search of phrases, of elegant turns of expression
and qualification, but he had never learnt how to apprehend the ideas
of an author. He had not cared to do this for himself, and from the
examination point of view it had been simply a w