[24] Variety of affection, in a household in which many relations had
lived together, had brought variety of sorrow. But they were well-
nigh healed now--those once so poignant griefs--the scars remaining
only as deeper lines of natural expression. It was visible, to their
surprise, that he penetrated the motive of the mass said so solemnly,
in violet, on the Innocents' Day, and understood why they wept at the
triumphant antiphons:--"My soul is escaped as a bird out of the snare
of the fowler!"--thinking intently of the little tombs which had
recorded carefully almost the minutes of children's lives, Elizabeth
de Latour, Cornelius de Latour, aged so many years, days, hours.
Yes! the cold pavement under one's feet had once been molten lava.
Surely the resources of sorrow were large in things! The fact must
be duly marked and provided for, with due estimate of his own
susceptibility thereto, in his scheme of life. Might he pass through
the world, unriven by sorrows such as those! And already it was as
if he stept softly over the earth, not to outrage its so abundant
latent sensibilities.

The beauty of the world and its sorrow, solaced a little by religious
faith, itself so beautiful a thing; these were the chief impressions
with which he made his way outwards, at first only in longer rambles,
as physical strength increased, over his native plains, whereon, as
we have seen, the cruel warfare of that age had [25] aggravated at a
thousand points the everyday appeal of suffering humanity. The vast
level, stretching thirty miles from east to west, thirty from north
to south:--perhaps the reader may think little of its resources for
the seeker after natural beauty, or its capacity to develope the
imagination. A world, he may fancy, in which there could be no
shadows, at best not too cheerful colours. In truth, it was all