le at a true estimate of
tendencies and motives; the time had not yet come, said the most
philosophical historians, for any deductions to be drawn as to the
development of the mind of the world, the slow increase of knowledge
and civilisation; and yet that was the only ultimate value of their
work, to attempt, namely, to arrive at the complex causes and
influences that determined the course of history and progress. Hugh
felt instinctively that his mind, impatient, inaccurate, subtle rather
than profound, was ill adapted for such work as this. He felt that it
was rather his work to arrive, if he could, at a semi-poetical,
semi-philosophical interpretation of life, and to express this as
frankly as he could. And thus reading must be for him an attempt to
refine and quicken his insight into the human mind, working in the more
delicate regions of art. He must study expression and personality; he
must keep his spirit sensitive to any hint of truth or beauty, any
generous and ardent intuition, any grace and seemliness of thought. He
was fond of books of travel, as opening to him a larger perspective of
human life, and revealing to him the conclusions to which experience
and life had brought men of other nationalities and other creeds.
Biography was his most beloved study, because it opened out to him the
vast complexity of human motive; but he thought that its chief value
had been in revealing to him the extraordinary part that conventional
and adopted beliefs and motives played in the majority of lives.

His reading, then, began to have for him a deep and special
significance. He was no philosopher; he found that the metaphysical
region, where one stumbled among the dim ultimate causes of things,
only gave him a sense of insecurity and despair; but he was in a sense
a psychologist; his experience of life had taught him to have an
inkling of the influences that affect character, and still more of the
stubborn power of character in resisting influences. Poetry was to him
a region in which one became aware of strange and almost magical
forces, which came floating out of unknown and mysterious depths--it
was a world of half-heard echoes, momentary glimpses, mysterious
appeals. In history and in biography one saw more of the interacting
forces of temperament; but in poetry, as the interpreter of nature, one
found oneself among cries and thrills which seemed to rise from the
inner heart of the world. It was the same with