Altogether a melancholy, pitiable man--at once thorough-going sceptic and thorough-going idealist, the victim of that critical sense which says 'No' to every impulse, and is always restlessly and yet hopelessly, seeking the future through the neglected and outraged present.
And yet the man's instincts, at this period of his life at any rate, were habitually kindly and affectionate.

He knew nothing of women, and was not liked by them, but it was not his fault if he made no impression on the youth about him.

It seemed to him that he was always seeking in their eyes and faces for some light of sympathy which was always escaping him, and which he was powerless to compel.

He met it for the first time in Robert Elsmere.

The susceptible, poetical boy was struck at some favorable moment by that romantic side of the ineffective tutor--his silence, his melancholy, his personal beauty--which no one else, with perhaps one or two exceptions among the older men, cared to take into account; or touched perhaps by some note in him, surprised in passing, by weariness or shrinking, as compared with the contemptuous tone of the college toward him.