rush of that general inspiration in which at first all differences, all
individual relations to the world he lived in, seemed almost ruefully or
bewilderedly to lose themselves. The pressing thing was of a sudden that
youth was youth and genius community and sympathy. He plunged into that
full measure of these things which simply made and spread itself as it
gathered them in, made itself of responses and faiths and understandings
that were all the while in themselves acts of curiosity, romantic and
poetic throbs and wonderments, with reality, as it seemed to call
itself, breaking in after a fashion that left the whole past pale, and
that yet could flush at every turn with meanings and visions borrowing
their expression from whatever had, among those squandered
preliminaries, those too merely sportive intellectual and critical
values, happened to make most for the higher truth. Of the successions
of his matter of history at this time Mr Marsh's memoir is the
infinitely touching record--touching after the fact, but to the
accompaniment even at the time of certain now almost ineffable
reflections; this especially, I mean, if one happened to be then not
wholly without familiar vision of him. What could strike one more, for
the immense occasion, than the measure that might be involved in it of
desolating and heart-breaking waste, waste of quality, waste for that
matter of quantity, waste of all the rich redundancies, all the light
and all the golden store, which up to then had formed the very price and
grace of life? Yet out of the depths themselves of this question rose
the other, the tormenting, the sickening and at the same time the
strangely sustaining, of why, since the offering couldn't at best be
anything but great, it wouldn't be great just in proportion to its
purity, or in other words its wholeness, everything in it that could
make it most radiant and restless. Exquisite at such times the hushed
watch of the mere hovering spectator unrelieved by any action of his own
to take, which consists at once of so much wonder for why the finest of