absolute position; when, as it were, we take stock of our experience,
and ascertain how rich sorrow and pleasure, feeling and thought,
intercourse with our fellow creatures and the fortuitous mysteries of
life,--have made us in wisdom.

The quick intelligence and the ardent imagination of Sybil had made
her comprehend with fervor the two ideas that had been impressed on
her young mind; the oppression of her church and the degradation of
her people. Educated in solitude and exchanging thoughts only with
individuals of the same sympathies, these impression had resolved
themselves into one profound and gloomy conviction, that the world was
divided only between the oppressors and the oppressed. With her, to
be one of the people, was to be miserable and innocent; one of the
privileged, a luxurious tyrant. In the cloister, in her garden, amid the
scenes of suffering which she often visited and always solaced, she had
raised up two phantoms which with her represented human nature.

But the experience of the last few months had operated a great change in
these impressions. She had seen enough to suspect that the world was a
more complicated system than she had preconceived. There was not that
strong and rude simplicity in its organization she had supposed. The
characters were more various, the motives more mixed, the classes more
blended, the elements of each more subtle and diversified, than she had
imagined. The People she found was not that pure embodiment of unity
of feeling, of interest, and of purpose, which she had pictured in
her abstractions. The people had enemies among the people: their own
passions; which made them often sympathize, often combine, with the
privileged. Her father, with all his virtues, all his abilities,
singleness of purpose and simplicity of aim, encountered rivals in their
own Convention, and was beset by open or, still worse, secret foes.

Sybil, whose mind had been nurtured with great thoughts, and with
whom success or failure alike partook of the heroic, who had hoped for
triumph, but who was prepared for sacrifice, found to her surprise that
great thoughts have very little to do with the business of the world;
that human affairs, even in an age of revolution, are the subject
of compromise; and that the essence of compromise is littleness. She
thought that the People, calm and collected, conscious at last of their
strength and confident in their holy cause, had but to express their
pure and