at its full satisfaction would not be enough for him. The
bed was too narrow for a man to stretch himself on. What he was
in search of must underlie and embrace his human love, and
support it. Beyond and above all private and personal desires and
hopes and longings, he was conscious of a restless craving and
feeling about after something, which he could not grasp, and yet
which was not avoiding him, which seemed to be mysteriously
laying hold of him and surrounding him.

The routine of chapels, and lectures, and reading for degree,
boating, cricketing, Union-debating,--all well enough in their
way--left this vacuum unfilled. There was a great outer visible
world, the problems and puzzles of which were rising before him
and haunting him more and more; and a great inner and invisible
world opening round him in awful depth. He seemed to be standing
on the brink of each--now shivering and helpless, feeling like an
atom about to be whirled into the great flood and carried he knew
not where--now ready to plunge in and take his part, full of hope
and belief that he was meant to buffet in the strength of a man
with the seen and the unseen, and to be subdued by neither.

In such a year as this, a bit of steady, bright blue sky was a
boon beyond all price, and so he felt it to be. And it was not
only with his father that Tom regained lost ground in this year.
He was in a state of mind in which he could not bear to neglect
or lose any particle of human sympathy, and so he turned to old
friendships, and revived the correspondence with several of his
old school-fellows, and particularly with Arthur, to the great
delight of the latter, who had mourned bitterly over the few
half-yearly lines, all he had got from Tom of late, in answer to
his own letters, which had themselves, under the weight of
neglect, gradually dwindled down to mere formal matters. A
specimen of the later correspondence may fitly close the
chapter:--

ST. AMBROSE

"Dear Geordie--I can hardly pardon you for having gone to
Cambridge, though you have got a Trinity scholarship--which I
suppose is, on the whole, quite as good a thing as anything of
the sort you could have got up here. I had so looked forward to
having you here though, and now I feel that we shall probably
scarcely ever meet. You will go your way and I mine; and one
alters so quickly, and gets into such strange new grooves, that
unless one sees a man about once a week at least, you may be just