These were actually Lydgate's first meditations as he walked away from

Mr. Vincy's, and on this ground I fear that many ladies will consider

him hardly worthy of their attention. He thought of Rosamond and her

music only in the second place; and though, when her turn came, he

dwelt on the image of her for the rest of his walk, he felt no

agitation, and had no sense that any new current had set into his life.

He could not marry yet; he wished not to marry for several years; and

therefore he was not ready to entertain the notion of being in love

with a girl whom he happened to admire. He did admire Rosamond

exceedingly; but that madness which had once beset him about Laure was

not, he thought, likely to recur in relation to any other woman.

Certainly, if falling in love had been at all in question, it would

have been quite safe with a creature like this Miss Vincy, who had just

the kind of intelligence one would desire in a woman--polished,

refined, docile, lending itself to finish in all the delicacies of

life, and enshrined in a body which expressed this with a force of

demonstration that excluded the need for other evidence. Lydgate felt

sure that if ever he married, his wife would have that feminine

radiance, that distinctive womanhood which must be classed with flowers

and music, that sort of beauty which by its very nature was virtuous,

being moulded only for pure and delicate joys.

But since he did not mean to marry for the next five years--his more

pressing business was to look into Louis' new book on Fever, which he

was specially interested in, because he had known Louis in Paris, and

had followed many anatomical demonstrations in order to ascertain the

specific differences of typhus and typhoid. He went home and read far

into the smallest hour, bringing a much more testing vision of details

and relations into this pathological study than he had ever thought it

necessary to apply to the complexities of love and marriage, these

being subjects on which he felt himself amply informed by literature,

and that traditional wisdom which is handed down in the genial

conversation of men. Whereas Fever had obscure conditions, and gave

him that delightful labor of the imagination which is not mere

arbitrariness, but the exercise of disciplined power--combining and

constructing with the clearest eye for probabilities and the fullest

obedience to knowledge; and then, in yet more energetic alliance with

impartial Nature, standing aloof to invent tests by which to try its

own work.

Many men have been praised as vividly imaginative on the strength of

their profuseness in indifferent drawing or cheap narration:--reports

of very poor talk going on in distant orbs; or portraits of Lucifer

coming down on his bad errands as a large ugly man with bat's wings and

spurts of phosphorescence; or exaggerations of wantonness that seem to

reflect life in a diseased dream. But these kinds of inspiration

Lydgate regarded as rather vulgar and vinous compared with the

imagination that reveals subtle actions inaccessible by any sort of

lens, but tracked in that outer darkness through long pathways of

necessary sequence by the inward light which is the last refinement of

Energy, capable of bathing even the ethereal atoms in its ideally

illuminated space. He for his part had tossed away all cheap

inventions where ignorance finds itself able and at ease: he was

enamoured of that arduous invention which is the very eye of research,

provisionally framing its object and correcting it to more and more

exactness of relation; he wanted to pierce the obscurity of those

minute processes which prepare human misery and joy, those invisible

thoroughfares which are the first lurking-places of anguish, mania, and

crime, that delicate poise and transition which determine the growth of

happy or unhappy consciousness.




readonlinefreebook.com Copyright 2016 - 2024