e sun pleasant, still cherish in themselves that
inexhaustible faith in an ideal something which supplies from century to
century the invincible motive power of the race?
Presently--by virtue of long critical and philosophical habit--his mind
brought itself to bear more and more steadily upon his own position; he
stepped back, as it were, from himself and became his own spectator. The
introspective temper was not common with him; his mind was naturally
turned outward--towards other people, towards books, towards intellectual
interests. But self-study had had its charm for him of late, and, amongst
other things, it was now plain to him that up to the moment of his first
meeting with Isabel Bretherton his life had been mostly that of an
onlooker--a bystander. Society, old and new, men and women of the past
and of the present, the speculative achievements of other times and of
his own,--these had constituted a sort of vast drama before his eyes,
which he had watched and studied with an ever-living curiosity. But his
interest in his particular _role_ had been comparatively weak, and in
analysing other individualities he had run some risk of losing his own.
Then love came by, and the half-dormant personality within him had been
seized upon and roused, little by little, into a glowing, although a
repressed and hidden energy. He had learnt in his own person what it
means to crave, to thirst, to want. And now, grief had followed and had
pinned him more closely than ever to his special little part in the human
spectacle. The old loftiness, the old placidity of mood, were gone. He
had loved, and lost, and despaired. Beside those great experiences how
trivial and evanescent seemed all the interests of the life that went
before them! He looked back over his intercourse with Isabel Bretherton,
and the points upon which it had turned seemed so remote from him, so
insignificant, that for the moment he could hardly realise them. The
artistic and aesthetic questions which had seemed to him so vital six
months before had faded almost out of view in the fierce neighbourhood of
sorrow and passion. His first relation to her had been that of one who
knows to one who is ignorant; but that puny link had dropped, and he was
going to meet her now, fresh from the presence of death, loving her as a
man loves a woman, and claiming from her nothing but pity for his grief,
balm for his wound,--the answer of human tenderness to human need.
How str
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