“It was like a stream of water crossing unexpectedly a dusty way—_Mirabilia testimonia tua!_ In psalm and antiphon, inexhaustibly fresh, the soul seemed to be taking refuge, at that undevout hour, from the sordid languor and the mean business of men’s lives, in contemplation of the unfaltering vigour of the divine righteousness, which had still those who sought it, not only watchful in the night but alert in the drowsy afternoon. Yes! there was the sheep astray, _sicut ovis quae periit_—the physical world; with its lusty ministers, at work, or sleeping for a while amid the stubble, their faces upturned to the August sun—the world so importunately visible, intruding a little way, with its floating odours, in that semicircle of heat across the old over-written pavement at the great open door, upon the mysteries within.” The quiet life of the Manor is broken shortly afterwards by a sudden visit of the young King Charles the Ninth, who enters from a hunting expedition, and “with a relish for the pleasant cleanliness of the place” utters a shrill strain of half-religious oaths. Pale, with an ivory whiteness, vivacious, unbalanced, the young king feels the charm of the place, touches a lute, talks of verses, and scratches a stanza of his own with a diamond upon a window-pane. As Gaston lives on his quiet life in a disturbed and alarmed country his reflective nature begins to open. “In a sudden tremor of an aged voice, the handling of a forgotten toy, a childish drawing, in the tacit observance of a day, he became aware suddenly of the great stream of human tears falling always through the shadows of the world.” He goes on to join the episcopal household of Chartres as a page, in the company of other noble youths. He makes friends; books and talk—“the brilliant surface of the untried world”—confront him; but his own calm instinct, his tranquillising sense of religion, provide the necessary balance. He takes three chosen companions home with him to spend the hot bright weeks of the summer; and here, through the poems of Ronsard, the infection of the living and breathing spirit of the modern poetry, near, actual, tangible like the faces of flowers, seizes upon him. “Never before had words, single words, meant so much. What expansion, what liberty of heart, in speech: how associable to music, to singing, the written lines! He sang of the lark, and it was the lark’s voluble self. The physical beauty of humanity lent itself to every object, animate or inanimate, to the very hours and lapses and changes of time itself. An almost burdensome fulness of expression haunted the gestures, the very dress, the personal ornaments, of the people on the highway.” “Here was a discovery, a new faculty, a privileged apprehension, to be conveyed in turn to one and to another, to be propagated for the imaginative regeneration of the world.”