ess, to the friend
nearest him just then, Colonel von Tresten, calling them to him, were
dashed to paper in this naked frenzy, and he could rave with all the
truth of life, that to have acted the idiot, more than the loss of the
woman, was the ground of his anguish. Each antecedent of his career had
been a step of strength and success departed. The woman was but a
fragment of the tremendous wreck; the woman was utterly diminutive, yet
she was the key of the reconstruction; the woman won, he would be himself
once more: and feeling that, his passion for her swelled to full tide and
she became a towering splendour whereat his eyeballs ached, she became a
melting armful that shook him to big bursts of tears.

The feeling of the return of strength was his love in force. The giant in
him loved her warmly. Her sweetness, her archness, the opening of her
lips, their way of holding closed, and her brightness of wit, her tender
eyelashes, her appreciating looks, her sighing, the thousand varying
shades of her motions and her features interflowing like a lighted water,
swam to him one by one like so many handmaiden messengers distinctly
beheld of the radiant indistinct whom he adored with more of spirit in
his passion than before this tempest. A giant going through a giant's
contortions, fleshly as the race of giants, and gross, coarse, dreadful,
likely to be horrible when whipped and stirred to the dregs, Alvan was
great-hearted: he could love in his giant's fashion, love and lay down
life for the woman he loved, though the nature of the passion was not
heavenly; or for the friend who would have to excuse him often; or for
the public cause--which was to minister to his appetites. He was true
man, a native of earth, and if he could not quit his huge personality to
pipe spiritual music during a storm of trouble, being a soul wedged in
the gnarled wood of the standing giant oak, and giving mighty sound of
timber at strife rather than the angelical cry, he suffered, as he loved,
to his depths.

We have not to plumb the depths; he was not heroic, but hugely man. Love
and man sometimes meet for noble concord; the strings of the hungry
instrument are not all so rough that Love's touch on them is
indistinguishable from the rattling of the wheels within; certain herald
harmonies have been heard. But Love, which purifies and enlarges us, and
sets free the soul, Love visiting a fleshly frame must have time and
space, and some help of circu