ry life, the long prayers, and the meditations. He
was profoundly moved, but it did not even then seem to him desirable to
choose such a way, or to have such attainment thrust on him.

Next morning the autumn sunlight chased the recollection of his emotion
from his mind. The fishermen stopped his car as he drove through the
street to shake hands with him. Their wives shouted familiar blessings
from the cabin doors. Father Moran came bare-headed to the gate of his
presbytery garden and waved a farewell.

CHAPTER II

There is that about the material fabric, the actual stone and mortar, of
Trinity College, Dublin, which makes a vivid appeal to the imagination
of the common man. The cultured sentimentalist will not indeed be
able to lave his soul in tepid emotion while he walks through these
quadrangles, as he may among the cloisters and chapels of the Oxford
colleges. The amateur of the past cannot here stand at gaze before any
single building as he does before the weather-beaten front of Oriel,
tracing in imagination the footsteps of Newman or Arnold. Yet to the
average man, and far more to the newly emancipated schoolboy, Trinity
College, Dublin, makes an appeal which can hardly be ignored. In Oxford
and Cambridge town and University are mixed together; shops jostle and
elbow colleges in the streets. In Dublin a man leaves the city behind
him when he enters the college, passes completely out of the atmosphere
of the University when he steps on to the pavement. The physical
contrast is striking enough, appealing to the ear and the eye. The
rattle of the traffic, the jangling of cart bells, the inarticulate
babel of voices, suddenly cease when the archway of the great
entrance-gate is passed.

An immense silence takes their place. There is no longer any need for
watchfulness, nor risk of being hustled by the hurrying crowds.
Instead of footway and street crossing there are broad walks, untrodden
stretches of smooth grass. The heavy campanile is in front, and heights
of gray building frown down on each side. It needs no education, not
even any imagination, to appreciate the change. It is not necessary to
know that great scholars inhabited the place, to recall any name or
any man's career. The appeal is not to a recollected impression of the
Middle Ages, or indeed of any past, remote or near. It is the spirit of
scholarship itself, abstract, intangible, which creates this atmosphere.
Knowledge, a severe goddess, aw