nothing more, Hugh perceived, than this inward-drawing impulse, calling rather than coercing men to aspire to its own supreme serenity; all our ideas of what was pure and beautiful and true, then, were the same vast centripetal force, moving silently inward; all our sorrows, our mistakes, our sufferings, were but the checking of that overpowering influence; and any rest was impossible till we had drawn nearer to the central peace. This seemed to Hugh to be not a theory but an intensely inspiring and practical thought. How light-hearted, how brave a secret! Instead of desiring that all should be made plain at once, one could rejoice in the thought that one was certainly speeding homewards; and experience was no longer a blind conflict of forces, but a joyful nearing of the central sum of things. At all events, what a blitheness, what a zest it gave to the genius of Plato himself! With what eager inquisitiveness, in a sort of childlike gaiety, he hurried hither and thither, catching at every point some bright indication of the delightful mystery. Plato seemed to differ from the serious and preoccupied philosophers in this, that while they were lost in a grave and anxious scrutiny of phenomena, he was rather penetrated by the cheerfulness, the romance of the whole business. The intense personal emotions, which to the analytical philosophers seemed mere distracting elements, experiences to be forgotten, crushed, and left behind, were to Plato supreme manifestations of the one desire. One desired in others what one desired in God; the sense of admiration, the longing for sympathy, the desire that no close embrace, no passionate glance could satisfy, these were but deep yearnings after the perfect sympathy, the perfect understanding of God. And thus when Plato appeared most to be trifling with a subject, to be turning it over and over as a man may turn about a crystal in his hands, watching the lights blend and flash and separate on the polished facets, he was really drawing nearer to the truth, absorbing its delicious radiance and sweetness. Those sunny mornings, spent in strolling and talking, in colonnade or garden, in that imperishable Athens, seemed to Hugh like the talk of saints in some celestial city. Saints not of heavy and pious rectitude, conventional in posture and dreary in mind, but souls to whom love and laughter, pathos and sorrow, were alike sweet. Instead of approaching life with a sense of its gravity, its heinousness, its complexity, timid of joy and emotion and delight, practising sadness and solemnity, Plato and his followers began at the other end, and with an irrepressible optimism believed that joy was conquering and not being conquered, that light was in the ascendant, rippling outwards and onwards. And then the supreme figure of all, whether imaginary or not mattered little, Socrates himself, with what a joyful soberness and gravity did he move forward through experience,