He was a vigorous animal with a ready understanding, but no spark had yet kindled in him an intellectual passion; knowledge seemed to him a very superficial affair, easily mastered:  judging from the conversation of his elders, he had apparently got already more than was necessary for mature life.  Probably this was not an exceptional result of expensive teaching at that period of short-waisted coats, and other fashions which have not yet recurred.  But, one vacation, a wet day sent him to the small home library to hunt once more for a book which might have some freshness for him:  in vain! unless, indeed, he took down a dusty row of volumes with gray-paper backs and dingy labels—­the volumes of an old Cyclopaedia which he had never disturbed.  It would at least be a novelty to disturb them.  They were on the highest shelf, and he stood on a chair to get them down.  But he opened the volume which he first took from the shelf:  somehow, one is apt to read in a makeshift attitude, just where it might seem inconvenient to do so.  The page he opened on was under the head of Anatomy, and the first passage that drew his eyes was on the valves of the heart.  He was not much acquainted with valves of any sort, but he knew that valvae were folding-doors, and through this crevice came a sudden light startling him with his first vivid notion of finely adjusted mechanism in the human frame.  A liberal education had of course left him free to read the indecent passages in the school classics, but beyond a general sense of secrecy and obscenity in connection with his internal structure, had left his imagination quite unbiassed, so that for anything he knew his brains lay in small bags at his temples, and he had no more thought of representing to himself how his blood circulated than how paper served instead of gold.  But the moment of vocation had come, and before he got down from his chair, the world was made new to him by a presentiment of. endless processes filling the vast spaces planked out of his sight by that wordy ignorance which he had supposed to be knowledge.  From that hour Lydgate felt the growth of an intellectual passion.

We are not afraid of telling over and over again how a man comes to fall in love with a woman and be wedded to her, or else be fatally parted from her.  Is it due to excess of poetry or of stupidity that we are never weary of describing what King James called a woman’s “makdom and her fairnesse,” never weary of listening to the twanging of the old Troubadour strings, and are comparatively uninterested in that other kind of “makdom and fairnesse” which must be wooed with industrious thought and patient renunciation of small desires?  In the story of this passion, too, the development varies:  sometimes it is the glorious marriage, sometimes frustration and final parting.  And not seldom the catastrophe is bound up with the other passion, sung by the Troubadours.  For in the multitude of middle-aged men who go about