of
grain that endures, the seeds of after hope bring forth but a languid
and scanty harvest. My earliest idol was ambition; but then came others,
love and knowledge, and afterwards the desire to bless. That desire you
may term ambition: but we will suppose them separate passions; for by
the latter I would signify the thirst for glory, either in evil or in
good; and the former teaches us, though by little and little, to gain
its object, no less in secrecy than for applause; and Wisdom, which
opens to us a world, vast, but hidden from the crowd, establishes also
over that world an arbiter of its own, so that its disciples grow proud,
and, communing with their own hearts, care for no louder judgment than
the still voice within. It is thus that indifference not to the welfare
but to the report of others grows over us; and often, while we are the
most ardent in their cause, we are the least anxious for their esteem."

"And yet," said Lord Ulswater, "I have thought the passion for esteem is
the best guarantee for deserving it."

"Nor without justice: other passions may supply its place, and produce
the same effects; but the love of true glory is the most legitimate
agent of extensive good, and you do right to worship and enshrine it.
For me it is dead: it Survived--ay, the truth shall out!--poverty, want,
disappointment, baffled aspirations,--all, all, but the deadness, the
lethargy of regret when no one was left upon this altered earth to
animate its efforts, to smile upon its success, then the last spark
quivered and died; and--and--but forgive me--on this subject I am not
often wont to wander. I would say that ambition is for me no more; not
so are its effects: but the hope of serving that race whom I have loved
as brothers, but who have never known me,--who, by the exterior" (and
here something bitter mingled with his voice), "pass sentence upon the
heart; in whose eyes I am only the cold, the wayward, the haughty, the
morose,--the hope of serving them is to me, now, a far stronger passion
than ambition was heretofore; and whatever for that end the love of
fame would have dictated, the love of mankind will teach me still more
ardently to perform."

They were now upon the bridge. Pausing, they leaned over, and looked
along the scene before them. Dark and hushed, the river flowed sullenly
on, save where the reflected stars made a tremulous and broken beam on
the black surface of the water, or the lights of the vast City,