 arduous invention which is the very eye of
research, provisionally framing its object and correcting it to more and more
exactness of relation; he wanted to pierce the obscurity of those minute
processes which prepare human misery and joy, those invisible thoroughfares
which are the first lurking-places of anguish, mania, and crime, that delicate
poise and transition which determine the growth of happy or unhappy
consciousness.
    As he threw down his book, stretched his legs towards the embers in the
grate, and clasped his hands at the back of his head, in that agreeable
after-glow of excitement when thought lapses from examination of a specific
object into a suffusive sense of its connections with all the rest of our
existence - seems, as it were, to throw itself on its back after vigorous
swimming and float with the repose of unexhausted strength - Lydgate felt a
triumphant delight in his studies, and something like pity for those less lucky
men who were not of his profession.
    »If I had not taken that turn when I was a lad,« he thought, »I might have
got into some stupid draught-horse work or other, and lived always in blinkers.
I should never have been happy in any profession that did not call forth the
highest intellectual strain, and yet keep me in good warm contact with my
neighbours. There is nothing like the medical profession for that: one can have
the exclusive scientific life that touches the distance and befriend the old
fogies in the parish too. It is rather harder for a clergyman: Fare-brother
seems to be an anomaly.«
    This last thought brought back the Vincys and all the pictures of the
evening. They floated in his mind agreeably enough, and as he took up his
bed-candle his lips were curled with that incipient smile which is apt to
accompany agreeable recollections. He was an ardent fellow, but at present his
ardour was absorbed in love of his work and in the ambition of making his life
recognised as a factor in the better life of mankind - like other heroes of
science who had nothing but an obscure country practice to begin with.
    Poor Lydgate! or shall I say, Poor Rosamond! Each lived in a world of which
the other knew nothing. It had not occurred to Lydgate that he had been a
subject of eager meditation to Rosamond, who had neither any reason for throwing
her marriage into distant perspective, nor any pathological studies to divert
her mind from that ruminating habit, that inward repetition of looks, words, and
phrases, which makes a large part in the lives of most girls. He had not meant
to
