hore,
bankrupt of money and consideration; creeping to the family he had
deserted; with broken wing, never more to rise. But in his face there
was a light of knowledge that was new to it. Of the wounds of his body
he was never healed; died of them gradually, with clear-eyed
resignation; of his wounded pride, we knew only from his silence. He
returned to that city where he had lorded it in his ambitious youth;
lived there alone, seeing few; striving to retrieve the irretrievable;
at times still grappling with that mortal frailty that had brought him
down; still joying in his friend's successes; his laugh still ready, but
with a kindlier music; and over all his thoughts the shadow of that
unalterable law which he had disavowed and which had brought him low.
Lastly, when his bodily evils had quite disabled him, he lay a great
while dying, still without complaint, still finding interests; to his
last step gentle, urbane, and with the will to smile.

The tale of this great failure is, to those who remained true to him,
the tale of a success. In his youth he took thought for no one but
himself; when he came ashore again, his whole armada lost, he seemed to
think of none but others. Such was his tenderness for others, such his
instinct of fine courtesy and pride, that of that impure passion of
remorse he never breathed a syllable; even regret was rare with him, and
pointed with a jest. You would not have dreamed, if you had known him
then, that this was that great failure, that beacon to young men, over
whose fall a whole society had hissed and pointed fingers. Often have we
gone to him, red-hot with our own hopeful sorrows, railing on the
rose-leaves in our princely bed of life, and he would patiently give ear
and wisely counsel; and it was only upon some return of our own thoughts
that we were reminded what manner of man this was to whom we
disembosomed: a man, by his own fault, ruined; shut out of the garden of
his gifts; his whole city of hope both ploughed and salted; silently
awaiting the deliverer. Then something took us by the throat; and to see
him there, so gentle, patient, brave, and pious, oppressed but not cast
down, sorrow was so swallowed up in admiration that we could not dare to
pity him. Even if the old fault flashed out again, it but awoke our
wonder that, in that lost battle, he should have still the energy to
fight. He had gone to ruin with a kind of kingly _abandon_, like one who
condescended; but once ru