after the full measure of those cloudless days, he would feel well-
nigh wearied out, as if with a long succession of pictures and music.
As he wandered through the gay streets or on the sea-shore, the real
world seemed indeed boundless, and himself almost absolutely free in
it, with a boundless [48] appetite for experience, for adventure,
whether physical or of the spirit. His entire rearing hitherto had
lent itself to an imaginative exaltation of the past; but now the
spectacle actually afforded to his untired and freely open senses,
suggested the reflection that the present had, it might be, really
advanced beyond the past, and he was ready to boast in the very fact
that it was modern. If, in a voluntary archaism, the polite world of
that day went back to a choicer generation, as it fancied, for the
purpose of a fastidious self-correction, in matters of art, of
literature, and even, as we have seen, of religion, at least it
improved, by a shade or two of more scrupulous finish, on the old
pattern; and the new era, like the Neu-zeit of the German enthusiasts
at the beginning of our own century, might perhaps be discerned,
awaiting one just a single step onward--the perfected new manner, in
the consummation of time, alike as regards the things of the
imagination and the actual conduct of life. Only, while the pursuit
of an ideal like this demanded entire liberty of heart and brain,
that old, staid, conservative religion of his childhood certainly had
its being in a world of somewhat narrow restrictions. But then, the
one was absolutely real, with nothing less than the reality of seeing
and hearing--the other, how vague, shadowy, problematical! Could its
so limited probabilities be worth taking into account in any
practical question as to the rejecting or receiving [49] of what was
indeed so real, and, on the face of it, so desirable?

And, dating from the time of his first coming to school, a great