were habitually kindly and affectionate. He knew nothing of women,
and was not liked by them, but it was not his fault if he made no
impression on the youth about him. It seemed to him that he was
always seeking in their eyes and faces for some light of sympathy
which was always escaping him, and which he was powerless to compel.
He met it for the first time in Robert Elsmere. The susceptible,
poetical boy was struck at some favorable moment by that romantic
side of the ineffective tutor--his silence, his melancholy, his
personal beauty--which no one else, with perhaps one or two exceptions
among the older men, cared to take into account; or touched perhaps
by some note in him, surprised in passing, by weariness or shrinking,
as compared with the contemptuous tone of the college toward him.
He showed his liking impetuously, boyishly, as his way was, and
thenceforward during his University career Langham became his slave.
He had no ambition for himself; his motto might have been that
dismal one--'The small things of life are odious to me, and the
habit of them enslaves me; the great things of life are eternally
attractive to me, and indolence and fear put them by;' but for the
University chances of this lanky, red-haired youth--with his
eagerness, his boundless curiosity, his genius for all sorts of
lovable mistakes--he disquieted himself greatly. He tried to
discipline the roving mind, to infuse into the boy's literary temper
the delicacy, the precision, the subtlety of his own. His fastidious,
critical habits of work supplied exactly the antidote which Elsmere's
main faults of haste and carelessness required. He was always
holding up before him the inexhaustible patience and labor involved
in all true knowledge; and it was to the germs of critical judgment
so planted in him that Elsemere owed many of the later growths of
his development--growths with which we have not yet to concern
ourselves.