we went in with them. They treated us as strangers, and
made courteous way for us to pass.

Inside, the footfalls fell dumbly upon a great carpeted floor. It was
very like a great church, except that there was no altar or sign of
worship. At the far end, under an alcove, was a statue of white marble
gleaming white, with head and hand uplifted. The whole place had a
solemn and noble air. Out of the central nave there opened a series of
great vaulted chapels; and I could now see that in each chapel there
was a dark figure, in a sort of pulpit, addressing a standing audience.
There were names on scrolls over the doors of the light iron-work
screens which separated the chapels from the nave, but they were in a
language I did not understand.

Amroth stopped at the third of the chapels, and said, "Here, this will
do." We came in, and as before there was a courteous notice taken of us.
A man in black came forward, and led us to a high seat, like a pew, near
the preacher, from which we could survey the crowd. I was struck with
their look of weariness combined with intentness.

The lecturer, a young man, had made a pause, but upon our taking our
places, he resumed his speech. It was a discourse, as far as I could
make out, on the development of poetry; he was speaking of lyrical
poetry. I will not here reproduce it. I will only say that anything more
acute, delicate, and discriminating, and, I must add, more entirely
valueless and pedantic, I do not think I ever heard. It must have
required immense and complicated knowledge. He was tracing the
development of a certain kind of dramatic lyric, and what surprised me
was that he supplied the subtle intellectual connection, the missing
links, so to speak, of which there is no earthly record. Let me give a
single instance. He was accounting for a rather sudden change of thought
in a well-known poet, and he showed that it had been brought about by
his making the acquaintance of a certain friend who had introduced him
to a new range of subjects, and by his study of certain books. These
facts are unrecorded in his published biography, but the analysis of the
lecturer, done in a few pointed sentences, not only carried conviction
to the mind, but just, so to speak, laid the truth bare. And yet it was
all to me incredibly sterile and arid. Not the slightest interest was
taken in the emotional or psychological side; it was all purely and
exactly scientific. We waited until the end of the a