e force of
earlier days; but as strength adorned with knowledge, as empire imposing
law. Palma listens in satisfied repose; her task is done.

A stamp is heard overhead.

BOOK THE SIXTH.

Sordello is alone--face to face with his memory, with his conscience,
and, as we presently find out, with the greatest temptation he has ever
known. The moon is slowly rising; and just so the light of truth is
overflowing his past life, and laying bare its every recess. He sees no
fault in this past, except the want of a uniform purpose in which its
various moods could have coalesced, the all-embracing sense of existence
been translated into fact; but he unconsciously confesses its
selfishness, in deciding that this purpose should have been outside
him--a remote and uplifting, though sympathetic influence, such as the
moon is to the sea. Smaller lives than his have attained a higher
completeness, because they have worked for an ideal: because they have
had their moon.

"Where then is _his_ moon? What the love, the fear, the motive, in
short, that could match the strength, could sway the full tide, of a
nature like his?" He doubts its existence. And if, after all, he has
been destined to be a law to himself, must he not in some sense apply
this relative standard to the rest of life; and may not the outward
motive be at all times the embodiment of an inner want or law, which
only the stronger nature can realize as such? He has found his purpose.
That purpose is the people. "But the people is himself. The desire to
help it comes from within. Will he fulfil this the better for regarding
its suffering part as an outward motive, as something alien to himself,
and for which Self must be forsaken?" In plain words: would he not serve
it as well by serving his own interests as by forsaking them?

This sophistry is so patent that it startles even him; but it is only
silenced to reassert itself in another form. "The Guelph rule would
doubtless be the best. But what can he do to promote it? Attest his
belief by refusing the Emperor's badge? That would be something in the
end. But meanwhile, how many sympathies to be broken, how many aversions
defied, before the one ideal can be made to prevail. Is not the
proceeding too arbitrary? Would it be justified by the result? The
question is only one of ideas. If the men who supported each opposite
cause were wholly good or bad, his course would be clear. But such
divisions do not exist. All men are