The expectancy seemed to lie
deeper, in a region of the soul to which none were or ever had been
admitted, except some friends of his Oxford youth--long since dead.
And, suddenly, the contest which lay before him appeared to him under a
new aspect, bathed in a broad philosophic air; a light serene and
transforming, like the light of the Umbrian evening. Was it not possibly
true that he had no future place as the leader of English Liberalism?
Forces were welling up in its midst, forces of violent and revolutionary
change, with which it might well be he had no power to cope. He saw
himself, in a waking dream, as one of the last defenders of a lost
position. The day of Utopias was dawning; and what has the critical mind
to do with Utopias? Yet if men desire to attempt them, who shall
stay them?
Barton, McEwart, Lankester--with their boundless faith in the power of a
few sessions and measures to remake this old, old England--with their
impatiences, their readiness at any moment to fling some wild arrow from
the string, amid the crowded long-descended growths of English life: he
felt a strong intellectual contempt both for their optimisms and
audacities--mingled, perhaps; with a certain envy.
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