No! great men’s wives read “Sesame and Lilies,” and “Sartor Resartus,” and “Marius the Epicurean,” and “Richard Feverel,” and “Virginibus Puerisque,”—­they even try to read Newman’s “Apologia.”  Such were the books on the sunnier side of Theophilus Londonderry’s little library in No. 3 Zion Place.  In dark corners behind easy-chairs were the deep-sea pools of theology,—­pools which had long since given up all the fish they had in them for their owner,—­slabs of antique divinity, such as you would find likewise in the equally cherished library of Londonderry Senior.

Such were the fathers that slumbered on in a well-earned repose, and which, far from desiring new readers, were so old that they were glad to rest undisturbed,—­being far too self-important to confuse a considerate regard for their repose with neglect.  And many of them were really quite valuable as decoration, because of their fine old coats of gilded leather; and such were ranged in the more penetrable shadows or even in the lamp-light.  Theophilus would point to them as to a portrait-gallery of dead ancestors.  One might admire the quaint and distinguished cut of their clothes without dreaming of wearing the same,—­and indeed old divinity, he used to say, was poor food for young divines.

His divinity indeed was fed on the technical side, it is to be feared, by the more destructive biblical criticism, like most destructive engines, coming all the way from Germany, and at its more vital centres by importations of strong meat from Russia and Scandinavia.  Tolstoi and Ibsen were his archprophets.

There was likewise a great Paris moralist called Zola, and a strange old American father called Walt Whitman.  And beauty, that can never be far away from strength, found many new and wonderful prophets in that little library,—­poets and painters and musicians of whom hardly anyone else in Coalchester had yet heard, and certainly no one above the age of twenty-five.

Surely youth is in nothing more marvellous than in its mysterious power of attracting to itself into the most out-of-the-way places the sustenance and companionship it needs.  In the unlikeliest wilderness inspired youth is never without the mysteriously-brought food and the company of angels.  Powers of the air will sweep across continents to rescue it from prison, soft gales travel from south to north to sow seeds of beauty in its narrow ways, and little songs will flutter like butterflies for hundreds of miles to cheer its heart.

The Time-Spirit had given its angels charge concerning these young people, and, remote as they were from all the fiery centres of thought and the dreaming schools of art, Zion Place, no less than the Rue de Rivoli, took its thought of the newest and its beauty of the best.

CHAPTER VII

THE LITERARY AND PHILOSOPHICAL SOCIETY OF COALCHESTER