over him. To get there and live there, to move
among the churches and halls and become imbued with the _genius
loci_, had seemed to his dreaming youth, as the spot shaped its
charms to him from its halo on the horizon, the obvious and ideal
thing to do. "Let me only get there," he had said with the
fatuousness of Crusoe over his big boat, "and the rest is but a
matter of time and energy." It would have been far better for him in
every way if he had never come within sight and sound of the delusive
precincts, had gone to some busy commercial town with the sole object
of making money by his wits, and thence surveyed his plan in true
perspective. Well, all that was clear to him amounted to this, that
the whole scheme had burst up, like an iridescent soap-bubble, under
the touch of a reasoned inquiry. He looked back at himself along the
vista of his past years, and his thought was akin to Heine's:

Above the youth's inspired and flashing eyes
I see the motley mocking fool's-cap rise!

Fortunately he had not been allowed to bring his disappointment into
his dear Sue's life by involving her in this collapse. And the
painful details of his awakening to a sense of his limitations should
now be spared her as far as possible. After all, she had only known
a little part of the miserable struggle in which he had been engaged
thus unequipped, poor, and unforeseeing.

He always remembered the appearance of the afternoon on which he
awoke from his dream. Not quite knowing what to do with himself, he
went up to an octagonal chamber in the lantern of a singularly built
theatre that was set amidst this quaint and singular city. It had
windows all round, from which an outlook over the whole town and
its edifices could be gained. Jude's eyes swept all the views in
succession, meditatively, mournfully, yet sturdily. Those buildings
and their associations and privileges were not for him. From the
looming roof of the great library, into which he hardly ever had time
to enter, his gaze travelled on to the varied spires, halls, gables,
streets, chapels, gardens, quadrangles, which composed the ensemble
of this unrivalled panorama. He saw that his destiny lay not with
these, but among the manual toilers in the shabby purlieu which he
himself occupied, unrecognized as part of the city at all by its
visitors and panegyrists, yet without whose denizens the hard readers
could not read nor the high thinkers live.

He look