and then shot down upon some crowded battle-field, that is precisely the discipline which at that point of time his soul needs, and the blessedness of which he afterwards perceives; sometimes discipline is swift and urgent, sometimes it is slow and lingering:  but all experience is exactly apportioned to the quality of which each soul is in need.  The only reason why there seems to be an element of chance in it, is that the whole thing is so inconceivably vast and prolonged; and our happiness and our progress alike depend upon our realising at every moment that the smallest joy and the most trifling pleasure, as well as the tiniest ailment or the most subtle sorrow, are just the pieces of experience which we are meant at that moment to use and make our own.  No one, not even God, can force us to understand this; we have to perceive it for ourselves, and to live in the knowledge of it.”

“Yes,” I said, “it is true, all that.  My heart tells me so; but it is very wonderful and mysterious, all the same.  But, Amroth, I have seen and heard enough.  My spirit desires with all its might to be at its own work, hastening on the mighty end.  Now, I can hold no more of wonders.  Let me return.”

“Yes,” said Amroth, “you are right!  These wonders are so familiar to me that I forget, perhaps, the shock with which they come to minds unused to them.  Yet there are other things which you must assuredly see, when the time comes; but I must not let you bite off a larger piece than you can swallow.”

He took me by the hand; the breeze passed through my hair; and in an instant we were back at the fortress-gate, and I entered the beloved shelter, with a grateful sense that I was returning home.

XXV

I returned, as I said, with a sense of serene pleasure and security to my work; but that serenity did not last long.  What I had seen with Amroth, on that day of wandering, filled me with a strange restlessness, and a yearning for I knew not what.  I plunged into my studies with determination rather than ardour, and I set myself to study what is the most difficult problem of all—­the exact limits of individual responsibility.  I had many conversations on the point with one of my teachers, a young man of very wide experience, who combined in an unusual way a close scientific knowledge of the subject with a peculiar emotional sympathy.  He told me once that it was the best outfit for the scientific study of these problems, when the heart anticipated the slower judgment of the mind, and set the mind a goal, so to speak, to work up to; though he warned me that the danger was that the mind was often reluctant to abandon the more indulgent claims of the heart; and he advised me to mistrust alike scientific conclusions and emotional inferences.

I had a very memorable conversation with him on the particular question of responsibility, which I will here give.