harmonised and explained life,
joy and disaster alike, to have wound up a clue, to have brought it all
to a peaceful and perfect climax of silence, like a tale that is told;
and then it was necessary to go out to the world again with all its
bitterness, its weariness, its dissatisfaction--till one almost
wondered whether it was wise or brave to have chased and captured this
strange phantom of imagined peace.

Yes, it was wise sometimes, Hugh felt sure! to have refused it would
have been like refusing to drink from a cool and bubbling wayside
spring, as one fared on a hot noon over the shimmering
mountain-side--refused, in a spirit of false austerity, for fear that
one would thirst again through the dreary leagues ahead. As long as
one remembered that it was but an imagined peace, that one had not
attained it, it was yet well to remember that the peace was real, that
it existed somewhere, even though it was still shut within the heart of
God. However slow the present progress, however long the road, it was
possible to look forward in hope, to know that one would move more
blithely and firmly when the time should come for the desired peace to
be given one more abundantly; it helped one, as one stumbled and
lingered, to look a little further on, and to say, "I will run the way
of Thy commandments, when Thou hast set my heart at liberty."

XXXIV

Pictorial Art--Hand and Soul--Turner--Raphael--Secrets of Art

Hugh's professional life had given him little opportunity for indulging
artistic tastes. He had been very fond as a boy of sketching,
especially architectural subjects; it had trained his powers of
observation; but there had come a time when, as a young man, he had
deliberately laid his sketching aside. The idea in his mind had been
that if one desired to excel in any form of artistic expression, one
must devote all one's artistic faculty to that. He had been conscious
of a certain diffuseness of taste, a love of music and a love of
pictorial art being both strong factors in his mind; but he was also
dimly conscious that he matured slowly; that he had none of the facile
grasp of difficult things which characterised some of his more able
companions; his progress was always slow, and he arrived at mastery
through a long wrestling with inaccuracy and half knowledge; his
perception was quick, but his grasp feeble, while his capacity for
forgetting and losing his hold on things was great. He therefore made