‘Isn’t it hateful,’ he broke forth, ’this enforced idleness of mine?  To think that weeks and weeks go by and I remain just where I was, when the loss of an hour used to seem to me an irreparable misfortune.  I have such an appetite for knowledge, surely the unhappiest gift a man can be endowed with it leads to nothing but frustration.  Perhaps the appetite weakens as one grows in years; perhaps the sphere of one’s keener interests contracts; I hope it may be so.  At times I cannot work—­I mean, I could not—­for a sense of the vastness of the field before me.  I should like you to see my rooms at Balliol.  Shelves have long since refused to take another volume; floor, tables, chairs, every spot is heaped.  And there they lie; hosts I have scarcely looked into, many I shall never have time to take up to the end of my days.’

’You have the satisfaction of being able to give your whole time to study.’

’There is precisely the source of dissatisfaction My whole time, and that wholly insufficient.  I have a friend, a man I envy intensely; he has taken up the subject of Celtic literature; gives himself to it with single-heartedness, cares for nothing that does not connect itself therewith; will pursue it throughout his life; will know more of it than any man living.  My despair is the universality of my interests.  I can think of no branch of study to which I could not surrender myself with enthusiasm; of course I shall never master one.  My subject is the history of humanity; I would know everything that man has done or thought or felt.  I cannot separate lines of study.  Philology is a passion with me, but how shall I part the history of speech from the history of thought?  The etymology of any single word will hold me for hours; to follow it up I must traverse centuries of human culture.  They tell me I have a faculty for philosophy, in the narrow sense of the word; alas! that narrow sense implies an exhaustive knowledge of speculation in the past and of every result of science born in our own time Think of the sunny spaces in the world’s history, in each of which one could linger for ever I Athens at her fairest, Borne at her grandest, the glorious savagery of Merovingian courts, the kingdom of Frederick II., the Moors in Spain, the magic of Renaissance Italy—­to become a citizen of any one age means a lifetime of endeavour.  It is easy to fill one’s head with names and years, but that only sharpens my hunger.  Then there is the world of art; I would know every subtlest melody of verse in every tongue, enjoy with perfectly instructed taste every form that man has carved or painted.  I fear to enter museums and galleries; I am distracted by the numberless desires that seize upon me, depressed by the hopelessness of satisfying them.  I cannot even enjoy music from the mere feeling that I do not enjoy it enough, that I have not had time to study it, that I shall never get at its secret....  And when is one to live?  I cannot lose myself