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for sounds and odours and colour, but for the very subtle
sensations of the soul. The noble walks with the monkish
heart within him, and his eyes see things which saints in
their cells see too, and he is unastounded. His lips are not
lips that smile.
Philip, silent still, returned to the photograph of Toledo,
which seemed to him the most arresting picture of them all.
He could not take his eyes off it. He felt strangely that he
was on the threshold of some new discovery in life. He was
tremulous with a sense of adventure. He thought for an in-
stant of the love that had consumed him: love seemed very
trivial beside the excitement which now leaped in his heart.
The picture he looked at was a long one, with houses crowd-
ed upon a hill; in one corner a boy was holding a large map
of the town; in another was a classical figure representing
the river Tagus; and in the sky was the Virgin surrounded
by angels. It was a landscape alien to all Philip’s notion, for
he had lived in circles that worshipped exact realism; and
yet here again, strangely to himself, he felt a reality greater
than any achieved by the masters in whose steps humbly
he had sought to walk. He heard Athelny say that the rep-
resentation was so precise that when the citizens of Toledo
came to look at the picture they recognised their houses.
The painter had painted exactly what he saw but he had seen
with the eyes of the spirit. There was something unearthly
in that city of pale gray. It was a city of the soul seen by a
wan light that was neither that of night nor day. It stood on
a green hill, but of a green not of this world, and it was sur-
rounded by massive walls and bastions to be stormed by no

1 Of Human Bondage