e had chosen all these for himself! Such
was his selfishness. He was like a man placed in some terrible chamber
which is being slowly exhausted of air. His vitality was leaving him by
little and little. He scarcely perceived it.

Exhaustion of the bodily strength does not necessarily exhaust the will.
Faith is only a secondary power; the will is the first. The mountains,
which faith is proverbially said to move, are nothing beside that which
the will can accomplish. All that Gilliatt lost in vigour, he gained in
tenacity. The destruction of the physical man under the oppressive
influence of that wild surrounding sea, and rock, and sky, seemed only
to reinvigorate his moral nature.

Gilliatt felt no fatigue; or, rather, would not yield to any. The
refusal of the mind to recognise the failings of the body is in itself
an immense power.

He saw nothing, except the steps in the progress of his labours.

His object--now seeming so near attainment--wrapped him in perpetual
illusions.

He endured all this suffering without any other thought than is
comprised in the word "Forward." His work flew to his head; the strength
of the will is intoxicating. Its intoxication is called heroism.

He had become a kind of Job, having the ocean for the scene of his
sufferings. But he was a Job wrestling with difficulty, a Job combating
and making head against afflictions; a Job conquering! a combination of
Job and Prometheus, if such names are not too great to be applied to a
poor sailor and fisher of crabs and crayfish.

V

SUB UMBRA

Sometimes in the night-time Gilliatt woke and peered into the darkness.

He felt a strange emotion.

His eyes were opened upon the black night; the situation was dismal;
full of disquietude.

There is such a thing as the pressure of darkness.

A strange roof of shadow; a deep obscurity, which no diver can explore;
a light mingled with that obscurity, of a strange, subdued, and sombre
kind; floating atoms of rays, like a dust of seeds or of ashes; millions
of lamps, but no illumining; a vast sprinkling of fire, of which no man
knows the secret; a diffusion of shining points, like a drift of sparks
arrested in their course; the disorder of the whirlwind, with the
fixedness of death; a mysterious and abyssmal depth; an enigma, at once
showing and concealing its face; the Infinite in its mask of
darkness--these are the synonyms of night. Its weight lies heavily on
the soul of man.

This