d
fidelity; true in what he did, in what he spake and thought. They noted
that _he_ always meant something. A man rather taciturn in speech;
silent when there was nothing to be said; but pertinent, wise, sincere,
when he did speak; always throwing light on the matter. This is the only
sort of speech _worth_ speaking! Through life we find him to have been
regarded as an altogether solid, brotherly, genuine man. A serious,
sincere character; yet amiable, cordial, companionable, jocose even;--a
good laugh in him withal: there are men whose laugh is as untrue as
anything about them; who cannot laugh. One hears of Mahomet's beauty:
his fine sagacious honest face, brown florid complexion, beaming black
eyes;--I somehow like too that vein on the brow, which swelled up
black when he was in anger: like the "_horseshoe_ vein" in Scott's
_Redgauntlet_. It was a kind of feature in the Hashem family, this black
swelling vein in the brow; Mahomet had it prominent, as would appear.
A spontaneous, passionate, yet just, true-meaning man! Full of wild
faculty, fire and light; of wild worth, all uncultured; working out his
life-task in the depths of the Desert there.

How he was placed with Kadijah, a rich Widow, as her Steward, and
travelled in her business, again to the Fairs of Syria; how he managed
all, as one can well understand, with fidelity, adroitness; how her
gratitude, her regard for him grew: the story of their marriage is
altogether a graceful intelligible one, as told us by the Arab authors.
He was twenty-five; she forty, though still beautiful. He seems to have
lived in a most affectionate, peaceable, wholesome way with this wedded
benefactress; loving her truly, and her alone. It goes greatly
against the impostor theory, the fact that he lived in this entirely
unexceptionable, entirely quiet and commonplace way, till the heat of
his years was done. He was forty before he talked of any mission from
Heaven. All his irregularities, real and supposed, date from after
his fiftieth year, when the good Kadijah died. All his "ambition,"
seemingly, had been, hitherto, to live an honest life; his "fame,"
the mere good opinion of neighbors that knew him, had been sufficient
hitherto. Not till he was already getting old, the prurient heat of his
life all burnt out, and _peace_ growing to be the chief thing this world
could give him, did he start on the "career of ambition;" and, belying
all his past character and existence, set up as