meekness! Whether it come from woe or disease, the stroke which mars
a single fibre plays strange havoc with the mind. Slaves we are to our
muscles, and puppets to the spring of the capricious blood; and the
great soul, with all its capacities, its solemn attributes, and
sounding claims, is, while on earth, but a jest to this mountebank,--the
body,--from the dream which toys with it for an hour, to the lunacy
which shivers it into a driveller, laughing as it plays with its own
fragments, and reeling benighted and blinded to the grave!

We have before said that Lucy was fond both of her uncle and his
society; and still, whenever the subject of Lord Mauleverer and his suit
was left untouched, there was that in the conversation of Sir
William Brandon which aroused an interest in her mind, engrossed and
self-consuming as it had become. Sorrow, indeed, and sorrow's companion,
reflection, made her more and more capable of comprehending a very
subtle and intricate character. There is no secret for discovering the
human heart like affliction, especially the affliction which springs
from passion. Does a writer startle you with his insight into your
nature, be sure that he has mourned; such lore is the alchemy of tears.
Hence the insensible and almost universal confusion of idea which
confounds melancholy with depth, and finds but hollow inanity in the
symbol of a laugh. Pitiable error! Reflection first leads us to gloom,
but its next stage is to brightness. The Laughing Philosopher had
reached the goal of Wisdom; Heraclitus whimpered at the starting-post.
But enough for Lucy to gain even the vestibule of philosophy.

Notwithstanding the soreness we naturally experience towards all who
pertinaciously arouse an unpleasant subject, and in spite therefore
of Brandon's furtherance of Mauleverer's courtship, Lucy felt herself
inclined strangely, and with something of a daughter's affection,
towards this enigmatical being; in spite, too, of all the cold and
measured vice of his character,--the hard and wintry grayness of heart
with which he regarded the welfare of others, or the substances
of Truth, Honour, and Virtue,--the callousness of his fossilized
affections, which no human being softened but for a moment, and no
warm and healthful impulse struck, save into an evanescent and idle
flash;--in spite of this consummate obduracy and worldliness of
temperament, it is not paradoxical to say that there was something
in the man which Luc