led him through many a cloud-enveloped
day. Had he been free, it would have driven him on new travels. Yet
that was no longer a real resource. He did not desire to see other
lands, but to make a home in his own. And no home was promised him. The
longer he kept apart from Annabel, the dimmer did the vision of her
become; he held it a sign that he himself was seldom if ever in her
mind. Did he still love her? Rather he would have said that there lay
in him great faculty of love, which Annabel, if she willed it, could at
a moment bring into life; she, he believed, in preference to any woman
he had known. It was not passion, and the consciousness that it was
not, often depressed him. One of his ideals was that of a passion
nurtured to be the crowning glory of life. He did not love Annabel in
that way; would that he could have done!

This purely personal distress could not but affect his work. A month
before the end of the year he came to the resolve to choose a new
subject for the succeeding course of lectures. Forgetting all the sound
arguments by which he had been led to prefer the simple teaching of a
straightforward subject to any more ambitious prophecy, he was now
impelled to think out a series of discourses on--well, on things in
general. He got hold of the title, 'Thoughts for the Present,' and the
temptation to make use of it proved too great. English literature did
not hold the average proletarian mind. It had served him to make an
acquaintance with a little group of men; now he must address them in a
bolder way, reveal to them his personality. Had he not always
contemplated such revelation in the end? Yes, when he found his class
fit for it. But he was growing impatient with this slow progress--if
indeed it could be called progress at all. He would strike a more
significant note.

Walter was in danger, as you very well understand. There is no need at
this time of day to remind ourselves of teachers who have fallen into
the fatal springe of apostolicism. Men would so fain be prophets, when
once they have a fellow mortal by the ear. Egremont could have exposed
this risk to you as well as any, yet he deliberately ignored it in his
own case--no great novelty that. 'Have I not something veritably to
say? Are not thoughts of and for the present surging in my mind?
Whereto have we language if not for the purpose of uttering the soul
within us?' So he fell to work on his introductory lecture, and for a
few days had pea