regard for their repose with neglect. And many of them were really quite
valuable as decoration, because of their fine old coats of gilded
leather; and such were ranged in the more penetrable shadows or even in
the lamp-light. Theophilus would point to them as to a portrait-gallery
of dead ancestors. One might admire the quaint and distinguished cut of
their clothes without dreaming of wearing the same,--and indeed old
divinity, he used to say, was poor food for young divines.

His divinity indeed was fed on the technical side, it is to be feared,
by the more destructive biblical criticism, like most destructive
engines, coming all the way from Germany, and at its more vital centres
by importations of strong meat from Russia and Scandinavia. Tolstoi and
Ibsen were his archprophets.

There was likewise a great Paris moralist called Zola, and a strange old
American father called Walt Whitman. And beauty, that can never be far
away from strength, found many new and wonderful prophets in that little
library,--poets and painters and musicians of whom hardly anyone else in
Coalchester had yet heard, and certainly no one above the age of
twenty-five.

Surely youth is in nothing more marvellous than in its mysterious power
of attracting to itself into the most out-of-the-way places the
sustenance and companionship it needs. In the unlikeliest wilderness
inspired youth is never without the mysteriously-brought food and the
company of angels. Powers of the air will sweep across continents to
rescue it from prison, soft gales travel from south to north to sow
seeds of beauty in its narrow ways, and little songs will flutter like
butterflies for hundreds of miles to cheer its heart.