his "house," and the guests withdrew.

[70] "Yesterday's snow" was nowhere, a surprising sunlight
everywhere; through which, after gratefully bidding adieu to the
great poet, almost on their knees for a blessing, our adventurers
returned home. Gaston, intently pondering as he lingered behind the
others, was aware that this new poetry, which seemed to have
transformed his whole nature into half-sensuous imagination, was the
product not of one or more individual writers, but (it might be in
the way of a response to their challenge) a general direction of
men's minds, a delightful "fashion" of the time. He almost
anticipated our modern idea, or platitude, of the Zeit-geist. A
social instinct was involved in the matter, and loyalty to an
intellectual movement. As its leader had himself been the first to
suggest, the actual authorship belonged not so much to a star as to a
constellation, like that hazy Pleiad he had pointed out in the sky,
or like the swarm of larks abroad this morning over the corn, led by
a common instinct, a large element in which was sympathetic trust in
the instinct of others. Here, truly, was a doctrine to propagate, a
secret open to every one who would learn, towards a new management of
life,--nay! a new religion, or at least a new worship, maintaining
and visibly setting forth a single overpowering apprehension.

The worship of physical beauty a religion, the proper faculty of
which would be the bodily eye! Looked at in this way, some of the
well- [71] marked characteristics of the poetry of the Pleiad assumed
a hieratic, almost an ecclesiastical air. That rigid correctness;
that gracious unction, as of the medieval Latin psalmody; that
aspiring fervour; that jealousy of the profane "vulgar"; the sense,
flattering to one who was in the secret, that this thing, even in its