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 frame-work 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 'When his regard Was raised by intense pensiveness, two eyes, Two starry eyes, hung in the gloom of thought, And seemed, with their serene and azure smiles, To beckon him.' 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 warnings of the modern seer, and his dark vistas of starvation, crime, neglect, and discontent.
'Well,' he said to himself, as he closed the book, 'I suppose it is good for us easy-going ones now and then to face the possibility of a change.

Gold has grown on my back as feathers do on geese, without my own will or deed; but considering that gold, like feathers, is equally useful to those who have and those who have not, why, it is worth while for the goose to remember that he may possibly one day be plucked.