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Now all this immense story that fills three centuries, that gathers within itself so many revolutions, so many legislative reforms, so many great men, so many events, tragic and glorious, this vast history that for so many centuries holds the interest of all cultured nations, and that, considered as a whole, seems almost a prodigy, you can, on the track of the old idea of "corruption," explain in its profoundest origins by one small fact, universal, common, of the very simplest something that every one may observe in the limited circle of his own personal experience, by that automatic increase of ambitions and desires, with every new generation, which prevents the human world from crystallising in one form, constrains it to continual changes in material make-up as well as in ideals and moral appearance.
It must be true, as Ruskin contends, that not one man in fifteen thousand has ever observed anything, else how account for this wide-spread fallacy? The "wit of one," instead of crystallising this "wisdom of the many," should have flatly contradicted it.
At Oxford, however, rather different sentiments prevailed. The inherent effervescence of conglomerate youth had, during the two months of the term before Black Week, been gradually crystallising out into vivid oppositions. Normal adolescence, ever in England of a conservative tendency though not taking things too seriously, was vehement for a fight to a finish and a good licking for the Boers.
The old party lines had been traversed and effaced altogether under the insistence of these newer issues, and the conflict lay now with the party of the temporisers, who were for putting little political men to control and regulate the Food, and the party of reaction for whom Caterharn spoke, speaking always with a more sinister ambiguity, crystallising his intention first in one threatening phrase and then another, now that men must "prune the bramble growths," now that they must find a "cure for elephantiasis," and at last upon the eve of the election that they must "Grasp the nettle."
Could you have the life of any man really portrayed to you, sun-drawn as it were, its hopes, its fears, its revolutions of opinion in each day, its most anxious wishes attained, and then, perhaps, crystallising into its blackest regrets such a work would go far to contain all histories, and be the greatest lesson of love, humility, and tolerance, that men had ever read.
And for all the dim regions beyond, this prospect is sufficient, 'Where I am, there shall also My servant be. One Form towers above the present and the future, and they both derive their colouring and their worth from Him and our relation to Him. 'To follow' that is the condensed summary of life's duty. 'To be with' that is the crystallising of all our hopes. I. The all-sufficient law for life.
Kosinski, Armitage, myself? Vassili's words, "This is the result of struggling for a higher life," haunted me. Should we after all only succeed in making our own unhappiness, in sacrificing the weak to our uncompromising theories, and all this without advancing the cause of humanity one jot? The vague doubts and hesitations of the past few weeks seemed crystallising.
"If he was a traitor he ought to be punished as well as another man," wrote Madison to Jefferson, quoting the sentiment among the plain people of Virginia. Public sentiment in the United States was thus crystallising into political parties on the policy to be pursued toward the new French Republic.
M. Verdeil informs the Académie, that he has proved the chlorophyll, or resinous green colouring-matter of plants, to be 'a mixture of a perfectly colourless fat, capable of crystallising, and of a colouring principle which presents the greatest analogies with the red colouring principle of the blood, but which has never yet been obtained in a perfectly pure state. He has isolated a quantity for experiment and examination by a chemical process, and has added another fact to the list of those which shew a relation between animal and vegetable functions.
From the point of view of Matching's Easy that colossal crystallising of accumulated antagonisms was for a time no more than a confusion of headlines and a rearrangement of columns in the white windows of the newspapers through which those who lived in the securities of England looked out upon the world.
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