es or
unextin guished passions. He now for the first time regarded the
absorbing abstruse occupation as a possible source of fame. To be one in
the starry procession of those sons of light who have solved a new law
in the statute-book of heaven! Surely a grand ambition, not unbecoming
to his years and station, and pleasant in its labours to a man who loved
Nature's outward scenery with poetic passion, and had studied her inward
mysteries with a sage's minute research. Science needs not the author's
art--she rejects its gracess--he recoils with a shudder from its
fancies. But Science requires in the mind of the discoverer a limpid
calm. The lightnings that reveal Diespiter must flash in serene skies.
No clouds store that thunder

"Quo bruta tellus, et vaga flumina,
Quo Styx, et invisi horrida Taenari
Sedes, Atlanteusque finis
Concutitur!"

So long as you take science only as a distraction, science will not lead
you to discovery. And from some cause or other, Guy Darrell was more
unquiet and perturbed in his present than in his past seclusion.
Science this time failed even to distract. In the midst of august
meditations--of close experiment--some haunting angry thought from the
far world passed with rude shadow between Intellect and Truth--the heart
eclipsed the mind. The fact is, that Darrell's genius was essentially
formed for Action. His was the true orator's temperament, with the
qualities that belong to it--the grasp of affairs--the comprehension
of men and states--the constructive, administrative faculties. In
such career, and in such career alone, could he have developed all his
powers, and achieved an imperishable name. Gradually as science lost its
interest, he retreated from all his former occupations, and would wander
for long hours over the wild unpopulated landscapes round him. As if it
were his object to fatigue the body, and in that fatigue tire out
the restless brain, he would make his gun the excuse for rambles from
sunrise to twilight over the manors he had purchased years ago, lying
many miles off from Fawley. There are times when a man who has passed
his life in cultivating his mind finds that the more he can make the
physical existence predominate, the more he can lower himself to the
rude vigour of the gamekeeper, or his day-labourer--why, the more he can
harden his nerves to support the weight of his reflections.

In these rambles he was not always alone.