dswept round the house, and the
owls hooted in the elms, they would sit hand in hand, lost in love and
fait--Christ near them--Eternity, warm with God, enwrapping them.

So much for the man of action, the husband, the philanthropist. In
reality, great as was the moral energy of this period of Elsmere's life,
the dominant distinguishing note of it was not moral but intellectual.

In matters of conduct he was but developing habits and tendencies
already strongly present in him; in matters of his thinking, with every
month of this winter he was becoming conscious of fresh forces, fresh
hunger, fresh horizons.

'_One half of your day be the king of your world_,' Mr. Grey had said to
him; '_the other half be the slave of something which will take you out
of your world_, into the general life, the life of thought, of man as a
whole, of the universe.'

The counsel, as we have seen, had struck root and flowered into action.
So many men of Elsmere's type give themselves up once and for all
as they become mature to the life of doing and feeling, practically
excluding the life of thought. It was Henry Grey's influence in all
probability, perhaps, too, the training of an earlier Langham, that
saved for Elsmere the life of thought.

The form taken by this training of his own mind he had been thus
encouraged not to abandon, was, as we know, the study of history. He had
well mapped out before him that book on the origins of France which
he had described to Langham. It was to take him years, of course, and
meanwhile, in his first enthusiasm, he was like a child, revelling in
the treasure of work that lay before him. As he had told Langham, he had
just got below the surface of a great subject and was beginning to dig
into the roots of it. Hitherto he had been under the guidance of men
of his own day, of the nineteenth century historian, who refashions the
past on the lines of his own mind, who gives it rationality, coherence,
and, as it were, modernness, so that the main impression he produces on
us, so long as we look at that past through him only, is on the whole an
impression of continuity of _resemblance_.

Whereas, on the contrary, the first impression left on a man by the
attempt to plunge into the materials of history for himself is
almost always an extraordinarily sharp impression of _difference_, of
_contrast_. Ultimately, of course, he sees that those men and women
whose letters and biographies, whose creeds and genera