gory of St.
Edmundsbury plunges into the bosom of the Twelfth Century again,
and all is over. Monks, Abbot, Hero-worship, Government,
Obedience, Coeur-de-Lion and St. Edmund's Shrine, vanish like
Mirza's Vision; and there is nothing left but a mutilated black
Ruin amid green botanic expanses, and oxen, sheep and dilettanti
pasturing in their places.

Chapter XVII

The Beginnings

What a singular shape of a Man; shape of a Time, have we in this
Abbot Samson and his history; how strangely do modes, creeds,
formularies, and the date and place of a man's birth, modify the
figure of the man!

Formulas too, as we call them, have a _reality_ in Human Life.
They are real as the very _skin_ and _muscular tissue_ of a Man's
Life; and a most blessed indispensable thing, so long as they
have _vitality_ withal, and are a living skin and tissue to him!
No man, or man's life, can go abroad and do business in the world
without skin and tissues. No; first of all, these have to
fashion themselves,--as indeed they spontaneously and inevitably
do. Foam itself, and this is worth thinking of, can harden into
oyster-shell; all living objects do by necessity form to
themselves a skin.

And yet, again, when a man's Formulas become _dead;_ as all
Formulas, in the progress of living growth, are very sure to do!
When the poor man's integuments, no longer nourished from within,
become dead skin, mere adscititious leather and callosity,
wearing thicker and thicker, uglier and uglier; till no _heart_
any longer can be felt beating through them, so thick, callous,
calcified are they; and all over it has now grown mere calcified
oystershell, or were it polished mother-of-pearl, inwards almost
to the very heart of the poor man:--yes then, you may say, his
usefulness once more is quite obstructed; once more, he cannot
go abroad and do business in the world; it is time that
_he_ take to bed, and prepare for departure, which cannot now
be distant!

_Ubi homines sunt modi sunt._ Habit is the deepest law of human
nature. It is our supreme strength; if also, in certain
circumstances, our miserablest weakness.--From Stoke to Stowe is
as yet a field, all pathless, untrodden: from Stoke where I
live, to Stowe where I have to make my merchandises, perform my
businesses, consult my heavenly oracles, there is as yet no path
or human footprint; and I, impelled by such necessities, must
nevertheless undertake the journey. Let me