Precious as his love was to him, and deeply as it affected his whole
life, Tom felt that there must be something beyond it—that its full
satisfaction would not be enough for him. The bed was too narrow for a
man to stretch himself on. What he was in search of must underlie and
embrace his human love, and support it. Beyond and above all private
and personal desires and hopes and longings, he was conscious of a
restless craving and feeling about after something which he could
not grasp, and yet which was not avoiding him, which seemed to be
mysteriously laying hold of him and surrounding him.
The routine of chapels, and lectures, and reading for degree, boating,
cricketing, Union-debating—all well enough in their way—left this
vacuum unfilled. There was a great outer visible world, the problems
and puzzles of which were rising before him and haunting him more and
more; and a great inner and invisible world opening round him in awful
depth. He seemed to be standing on the brink of each—now, shivering
and helpless, feeling like an atom about to be whirled into the great
flood and carried he knew not where—now, ready to plunge in and take
his part, full of hope and belief that he was meant to buffet in the
strength of a man with the seen and the unseen, and to be subdued by
neither.