Zola, and a strange old
American father called Walt Whitman. And beauty, that can never be far
away from strength, found many new and wonderful prophets in that little
library,--poets and painters and musicians of whom hardly anyone else in
Coalchester had yet heard, and certainly no one above the age of
twenty-five.

Surely youth is in nothing more marvellous than in its mysterious power
of attracting to itself into the most out-of-the-way places the
sustenance and companionship it needs. In the unlikeliest wilderness
inspired youth is never without the mysteriously-brought food and the
company of angels. Powers of the air will sweep across continents to
rescue it from prison, soft gales travel from south to north to sow
seeds of beauty in its narrow ways, and little songs will flutter like
butterflies for hundreds of miles to cheer its heart.

The Time-Spirit had given its angels charge concerning these young
people, and, remote as they were from all the fiery centres of thought
and the dreaming schools of art, Zion Place, no less than the Rue de
Rivoli, took its thought of the newest and its beauty of the best.

CHAPTER VII

THE LITERARY AND PHILOSOPHICAL SOCIETY OF COALCHESTER

I have said that Coalchester was a very ignorant old town. I did not
mean to imply that there were no M.A.'s there. In fact, there were quite
a number. You may be sure that if spiritual and intellectual life had
its representatives, as we have seen, spiritual and intellectual death
had its representatives, too--by which I don't mean either to imply that
the M.A.'s were dead M.A.'s, dead and buried with Latin over them in the
old brassed and effigied church, which was so old and large that it was
hardly less conceited than a cathedral. Spiritual and intellectual death
in Coalchester, as elsewhere, was officially represented by the Literary
and Philosophical Society, which still unblushingly went on retaining
its adjectives, even in the face of its "Transactions," which seemed
mainly composed of treasurer's reports, with an occasional paper
on fossils.

Indeed the one spark of life in the pathetic old society was its real
interest in the antediluvian and prehistoric. For the life that was dead
it had a perfect passion, and it sometimes held conversaziones to gaze
at it through microscopes. Occasionally it would waken up to literature
with a paper on Akenside. In everything that didn't in the least matter
some of these mild old ge