Page:Yeast. A Problem - Kingsley (1851).djvu/116

imagination. For Lancelot, like all born artists, could only think in a concrete form. He never worked out a subject without embodying it in some set oration, dialogue, or dramatic castle in the air.

But the more he dreamt, the more he felt that a material beauty of flesh and blood required a material house, baths and boudoirs, conservatories and carriages; a safe material purse, and fixed material society; law, and order, and the established framework of society, gained an importance in his eyes which they had never had before.

'Well,' he said to himself, 'I am turning quite practical and auld-warld. Those old Greeks were not so far wrong when they said that what made men citizens, patriots, heroes, was the love of wedded wife and child.'

'Wedded wife and child!'—He shrank in from the daring of the delicious thought, as if he had intruded without invitation into a hidden sanctuary, and looked round for a book to drive away the dazzling picture. But even there his thoughts were haunted by Argemone's face, and

He took up, with a new interest, 'Chartism,' which alone of all Mr. Carlyle's works he had hitherto disliked, because his own luxurious day-dreams had always flowed in such sad discord with the terrible