As they neared the gate of the town they parted, Chide returning to the hotel, while Ferrier, the most indefatigable of sight-seers, hurried off toward San Pietro.

He spent a quiet hour on the Peruginos, deciding, however, with himself in the end that they gave him but a moderate pleasure; and then came out again into the glow of an incomparable evening.  Something in the light and splendor of the scene, as he lingered on the high terrace, hanging over the plain, looking down as though from the battlements, the flagrantia moenia of some celestial city, challenged the whole life and virility of the man.

“Yet what ails me?” he thought to himself, curiously, and quite without anxiety.  “It is as though I were listening—­for the approach of some person or event—­as though a door were open—­or about to open—­”

What more natural?—­in this pause before the fight?  And yet politics seemed to have little to do with it.  The expectancy seemed to lie deeper, in a region of the soul to which none were or ever had been admitted, except some friends of his Oxford youth—­long since dead.

And, suddenly, the contest which lay before him appeared to him under a new aspect, bathed in a broad philosophic air; a light serene and transforming, like the light of the Umbrian evening.  Was it not possibly true that he had no future place as the leader of English Liberalism?  Forces were welling up in its midst, forces of violent and revolutionary change, with which it might well be he had no power to cope.  He saw himself, in a waking dream, as one of the last defenders of a lost position.  The day of Utopias was dawning; and what has the critical mind to do with Utopias?  Yet if men desire to attempt them, who shall stay them?

Barton, McEwart, Lankester—­with their boundless faith in the power of a few sessions and measures to remake this old, old England—­with their impatiences, their readiness at any moment to fling some wild arrow from the string, amid the crowded long-descended growths of English life:  he felt a strong intellectual contempt both for their optimisms and audacities—­mingled, perhaps; with a certain envy.

Sadness and despondency returned.  His hand sought in his pocket for the little volume of Leopardi which he had taken out with him.  On that king of pessimists, that prince of all despairs, he had just spent half an hour among the olives.  Could renunciation of life and contempt of the human destiny go further?

Well, Leopardi’s case was not his.  It was true, what he had said to Chide.  With all drawbacks, he had enjoyed his life, had found it abundantly worth living.

And, after all, was not Leopardi himself a witness to the life he rejected, to the Nature he denounced.  Ferrier recalled his cry to his brother:  “Love me, Carlo, for God’s sake!  I need love, love, love!—­fire, enthusiasm, life.”

“Fire, enthusiasm, life.”  Does the human lot contain these things, or no?  If it does, have the gods mocked us, after all?