terial alike. The intense desire to
know, to solve, to improve, to gain a tranquil balance of thought, was
nothing more, Hugh perceived, than this inward-drawing impulse, calling
rather than coercing men to aspire to its own supreme serenity; all our
ideas of what was pure and beautiful and true, then, were the same vast
centripetal force, moving silently inward; all our sorrows, our
mistakes, our sufferings, were but the checking of that overpowering
influence; and any rest was impossible till we had drawn nearer to the
central peace. This seemed to Hugh to be not a theory but an intensely
inspiring and practical thought. How light-hearted, how brave a
secret! Instead of desiring that all should be made plain at once, one
could rejoice in the thought that one was certainly speeding homewards;
and experience was no longer a blind conflict of forces, but a joyful
nearing of the central sum of things. At all events, what a
blitheness, what a zest it gave to the genius of Plato himself! With
what eager inquisitiveness, in a sort of childlike gaiety, he hurried
hither and thither, catching at every point some bright indication of
the delightful mystery. Plato seemed to differ from the serious and
preoccupied philosophers in this, that while they were lost in a grave
and anxious scrutiny of phenomena, he was rather penetrated by the
cheerfulness, the romance of the whole business. The intense personal
emotions, which to the analytical philosophers seemed mere distracting
elements, experiences to be forgotten, crushed, and left behind, were
to Plato supreme manifestations of the one desire. One desired in
others what one desired in God; the sense of admiration, the longing
for sympathy, the desire that no close embrace, no passionate glance
could satisfy, these were but deep yearnings after the perfect
sympathy, the perfect understanding of God. And thus when Plato
appeared most to be trifling with a subject, to be turning it over and
over as a man may turn about a crystal in his hands, watching the
lights blend and flash and separate on the polished facets, he was
really drawing nearer to the truth, absorbing its delicious radiance
and sweetness. Those sunny mornings, spent in strolling and talking,
in colonnade or garden, in that imperishable Athens, seemed to Hugh
like the talk of saints in some celestial city. Saints not of heavy
and pious rectitude, conventional in posture and dreary in mind, but
souls to whom