fascination, and of daring thought.

There had been long cypress alleys which at sunset had glowed with
rose and gold, where he had in his few leisure hours builded up such
visions for the future as illumined the unknown years to the eyes of
an Ignatius, a Hildebrand, a Lacordaire, a Bossuet. On the place
where those grand avenues had stretched their green length in the
western light, and the seminarist had paced over the sward, there
were now long, dreary lines of brick and stone, the beaten dust of
roadways, the clang and smoke of engines: as the gardens had passed
away so had passed his ambitions and visions; as the cypresses had
been ground to powder in the steam mill, so was he crushed and
effaced under an inexorable fate. The Church, intolerant of
individuality, like all despotisms, had broken his spirit; like all
despotisms the tyranny had been blind. But he had been rebellious to
doctrine; she had bound him to her stake.

He would have been a great prelate, perhaps even a great Pope; but he
would have been also a great reformer, so she stamped him down into
nothingness under her iron heel. And for almost a score of years she
had kept him in Ruscino, where he buried and baptized the old and new
creatures who squirmed in the dust, where any ordinary country priest
able to gabble through the ritual could have done as well as he. Some
few of the more liberal and learned dignitaries of the Church did
indeed think that it was waste of great powers, but he had the Sacred
College against him, and no one ventured to speak in his favour at
the Vatican. He had no pious women of rank to plead for him, no
millionaires and magnates to solicit his preferment. He was with time
forgotten as utterly as a folio is forgotten on a library shelf until
mildew eats its ink away and spiders nest between its leaves. He had