The pupils pricked up their ears and listened. They had never heard anything like this before. They felt that he was talking out his life's blood, and at the same time that this established a tie of protective freemasonry between him and them. He continued in bold, rapid outline to draw vivid pictures of the men and period, making dead bones live. What had long been repressed and dammed up within him poured from him now in passionate eloquence. His hearers realised that this was something more than an ordinary school lesson, more even than the fruits of ripe scholarship. It was a confession of faith, and they hung on his lips with all the abandon of woman's enthusiasm for what she doesn't understand. Lilly, being a younger pupil, sat close under the dais, and she felt vaguely as if a vast flood of new melody was floating over her head; music having always played the supreme part in her life and imagination, pictures and thoughts came to her first through the world of sound. She grew pale, and gazed up at him in dawning appreciation. Through a mist of tears, her handkerchief crushed into a ball in her hand, she saw the nervous heaving of his chest, the drops on his forehead, the burning excitement that flamed in his cheeks, and she longed to laugh and cry together, to call out "Stop!" But, as she couldn't do this, she sat motionless, listening to the poor, thin voice as it proclaimed the gospel of that ancient yet ever-glorious time, and then she heard another voice deep down in her heart crying jubilantly, "It's coming!" "But what of the world," he went on, "in which that exalted life developed? Like Moses on the mountain-top, I have only seen it from afar, only lingered in its outer courts; but I have seen enough to know that, as long as breath is left in my body, my soul's yearning for it will never cease. There, gleaming palaces and temples rise like part of the soil, white among dark cypresses and evergreen leafy oaks. All that is clay here is marble there; what is here cribbed and cabined by convention, there flourishes in free creative opulence; here we have barren imitativeness, there spontaneous growth; here laboured culture, there Nature's happy abundance; here the deadening sense of utility, there luxuriant revelling in the beautiful; here, plain hard, matter-of-fact Protestantism, there the joyous _naivete_ of Catholic paganism."