came out
again into the glow of an incomparable evening. Something in the light
and splendor of the scene, as he lingered on the high terrace, hanging
over the plain, looking down as though from the battlements, the
_flagrantia moenia_ of some celestial city, challenged the whole life
and virility of the man.

"Yet what ails me?" he thought to himself, curiously, and quite without
anxiety. "It is as though I were listening--for the approach of some
person or event--as though a door were open--or about to open--"

What more natural?--in this pause before the fight? And yet politics
seemed to have little to do with it. The expectancy seemed to lie
deeper, in a region of the soul to which none were or ever had been
admitted, except some friends of his Oxford youth--long since dead.

And, suddenly, the contest which lay before him appeared to him under a
new aspect, bathed in a broad philosophic air; a light serene and
transforming, like the light of the Umbrian evening. Was it not possibly
true that he had no future place as the leader of English Liberalism?
Forces were welling up in its midst, forces of violent and revolutionary
change, with which it might well be he had no power to cope. He saw
himself, in a waking dream, as one of the last defenders of a lost
position. The day of Utopias was dawning; and what has the critical mind
to do with Utopias? Yet if men desire to attempt them, who shall
stay them?

Barton, McEwart, Lankester--with their boundless faith in the power of a
few sessions and measures to remake this old, old England--with their
impatiences, their readiness at any moment to fling some wild arrow from
the string, amid the crowded long-descended growths of English life: he
felt a strong intellectual contempt both for their optimisms and
audacities--mingled, perhaps; with a certain envy.

Sadness and despondency returned. His hand sought in his pocket for the
little volume of Leopardi which he had taken out with him. On that king
of pessimists, that prince of all despairs, he had just spent half an
hour among the olives. Could renunciation of life and contempt of the
human destiny go further?

Well, Leopardi's case was not his. It was true, what he had said to
Chide. With all drawbacks, he had enjoyed his life, had found it
abundantly worth living.

And, after all, was not Leopardi himself a witness to the life he
rejected, to the Nature he denounced. Ferrier recalled his cry to his
brother: "Lov