rnible;
the words youth, beauty, refinement, Jewish birth, noble gravity,
turned into hardly individual but typical form and color: gathered from
his memory of faces seen among the Jews of Holland and Bohemia, and
from the paintings which revived that memory. Reverently let it be said
of this mature spiritual need that it was akin to the boy's and girl's
picturing of the future beloved; but the stirrings of such young desire
are feeble compared with the passionate current of an ideal life
straining to embody itself, made intense by resistance to imminent
dissolution. The visionary form became a companion and auditor; keeping
a place not only in the waking imagination, but in those dreams of
lighter slumber of which it is truest to say, "I sleep, but my heart
waketh"--when the disturbing trivial story of yesterday is charged with
the impassioned purpose of years.

Of late the urgency of irremediable time, measured by the gradual
choking of life, had turned Mordecai's trust into an agitated watch for
the fulfillment that must be at hand. Was the bell on the verge of
tolling, the sentence about to be executed? The deliverer's footstep
must be near--the deliverer who was to rescue Mordecai's spiritual
travail from oblivion, and give it an abiding-place in the best
heritage of his people. An insane exaggeration of his own value, even
if his ideas had been as true and precious as those of Columbus or
Newton, many would have counted this yearning, taking it as the
sublimer part for a man to say, "If not I, then another," and to hold
cheap the meaning of his own life. But the fuller nature desires to be
an agent, to create, and not merely to look on: strong love hungers to
bless, and not merely to behold blessing. And while there is warmth
enough in the sun to feed an energetic life, there will still be men to
feel, "I am lord of this moment's change, and will charge it with my
soul."

But with that mingling of inconsequence which belongs to us all, and
not unhappily, since it saves us from many effects of mistake,
Mordecai's confidence in the friend to come did not suffice to make him
passive, and he tried expedients, pathetically humble, such as happened
to be within his reach, for communicating something of himself. It was
now two years since he had taken up his abode under Ezra Cohen's roof,
where he was regarded with much good-will as a compound of workman,
dominie, vessel of charity, inspired idiot, man of piety, and (i