A colder man might have come to such knowledge along impersonal paths, a coarser one would never have gone beyond it, but in Adams the old fighting spirit--a survival of the uncompromising Puritan conscience--had brought him up again, soul and body, to struggle afresh for a cleaner and a sharper air.

Life had meant more to him in the beginning than a mere series of sensations--more even than any bodily conditions, any material attainment; and it was the final triumph of his austere vision that it should mean most of all when it seemed to a casual glance to contain least of actual value..