spiritual mystery, the temperaments in one of artist and priest. He,
too, in a dim fashion indeed, and under conditions of culture less
favourable, had speculated and experimented in a similar manner upon the
literary art over which as yet he had acquired--how crushingly this
exquisite book taught him--such pathetically uncertain mastery. That
impassioned comradeship in books beautiful, was it not to-day Ned's and
his, as all those years before it had been that of Marius and Flavian?

And where in the world _was_ Ned? How he would kindle at a passage like
this: "_To keep the eye clear by a sort of exquisite personal alacrity
and cleanliness, extending even to his dwelling-place; to discriminate,
ever more and more exactly, select form and colour in things from what
was less select; to meditate much on beautiful visible objects, on
objects, more especially, connected with the period of youth,--on
children at play in the morning, the trees in early spring, on young
animals, on the fashions and amusements of young men; to keep ever by
him, if it were but a single choice flower, a graceful animal or
sea-shell, as a token and representation of the whole kingdom of such
things; to avoid jealously, in his way through the world, everything
repugnant to sight; and, should any circumstance tempt him to a general
converse in the range of such objects, to disentangle himself from that
circumstance at any cost of place, money, or opportunity: such were, in
brief outline, the duties recognised, the rights demanded, in this new
formula of life_."

And again, what gleaming single phrases, whole counsels of existence in
a dozen words! He must copy out some of them for Esther. This, for
example: "_Not pleasure, but fulness, completeness of life generally_,"
or this: "_To be able to make use of the flower when the fruit, perhaps,
was useless or poisonous_" or again this: "_To be absolutely virgin