God" and visions of a better life for man. He
read much poetry, and the New Testament spoke to him imperatively,
though in no orthodox or accustomed way. Ruskin, and the earlier work of
Tolstoy, then just beginning to take hold of the English mind, had
affected his thought and imagination, as the generation before him had
been affected by Carlyle, Emerson, and George Sand.

This present phase of his life, however, was the outcome of much that
was turbulent and shapeless in his first youth. He seemed to himself to
have passed through Oxford under a kind of eclipse. All that he could
remember of two-thirds of his time there was an immoderate amount of
eating, drinking, and sleeping. A heavy animal existence, disturbed by
moments of unhappiness and remorse, or, at best, lightened by intervals
and gleams of friendship with two or three men who tried to prod him out
of his lethargy, and cherished what appeared, to himself in particular,
a strange and unreasonable liking for him. Such, to his own thinking,
had been his Oxford life, up to the last year of his residence there.

Then, when he was just making certain of an ignominious failure in the
final schools, he became more closely acquainted with one of the college
tutors, whose influence was to be the spark which should at last fire
the clay. This modest, heroic, and learned man was a paralyzed invalid,
owing to an accident in the prime of life. He had lost the use of his
lower limbs--"dead from the waist down." Yet such was the strength of
his moral and intellectual life that he had become, since the
catastrophe, one of the chief forces of his college. The invalid-chair
on which he wheeled himself, recumbent, from room to room, and from
which he gave his lectures, was, in the eyes of Oxford, a symbol not of
weakness, but of touching and triumphant victory. He gave himself no
airs of resignation or of martyrdom. He simply lived his life--except
during those crises of weakness or pain when his friends were shut
out--as though it were like any other life, save only for what he made
appear an insignificant physical limitation. Scholarship, college
business or college sports, politics and literature--his mind, at
least, was happy, strenuous, and at home in them all. To have pitied him
would have been a mere impertinence. While in his own heart, which never
grieved over himself, there were treasures of compassion for the weak,
the tempted, and the unsuccessful, which spent the