I will not linger over the forces which helped my resolution, the great and general remedies which come to the relief of men in like evil case. Religion, philosophy, art, science, literature--all promised their anodynes against despair; slowly they stirred in me anew those springs of interest in life which disillusion seemed to have choked for ever. I rose up, and looking round upon the world saw that it was still good; and there came into my memory brave words which a golden book puts in the mouths of its indomitable knights: "I will take the adventure which God shall ordain me." I now perceived that if evil fortune had unhorsed me it had yet left me endurance to continue the combat on foot. My second failure was more final and disastrous than the first discomfiture in earlier life, but now the plague of pessimism was stayed by a greater recuperative power. Those long hours of the long eastern day, spent under the verandah with books of many ages and languages, had not been altogether fruitless; they had helped to mature a wider and more catholic taste than that of restless youth, the kind of culture that brings not rebellion but peace. In my eastern watch-tower I had re-read the great books from a new point of vantage, and let the eye roam over fields of literature which lie beyond the undergraduate's bounds; by a still permeation of fine influence, my crude philosophy was unconsciously mellowed, as the surface of ivory, according to Roman belief, by the bland air of Tibur. For by the mere being in an atmosphere of serenity our nature grows porous to gracious influences streaming in we know not how or when, and taking their abode in our very grain and structure. And so without consciousness of good desert, I found myself confident in a new discipline, and looking for the word of command from wiser leaders than Byron or the youthful Shelley. Queen Mab was now the saddest rhetoric, and Childe Harold's plaint unseemly lamentation; I had erased from my calendar of saints the names of apostles of affliction once held in honour; the Caliph Amurath with his tale of fourteen happy days out of a long life of royal opportunity; Swift with his birthday lection from Jeremiah. Rather there trooped into memory with a quiet pomp and induction of joy, forms of men who, though justified in rebellion by every human suffrage, remained loyal to the end and proved by endurance a more imperial humanity. Socrates unperturbed by mortal injustice; Dante a deep harmonious voice amid jangling destinies; William the Silent serene in every desperate conjecture--these seemed now the more perfect captains. If exile had done no more than transfer my allegiance to such as these, I had not borne the lash in vain.