poil Affection of its
food. But there was something akin in their joint experience of earthly
vanities;--so little solace in worldly honours to the triumphant
Orator--so little of misery to the vagrant Mime while his conscience
mutely appealed to Heaven from the verdict of his kind. And as beneath
all the levity and whim of the man reared and nurtured, and fitted by
his characteristic tendencies, to view life through its humours, not
through its passions, there still ran a deep undercurrent of grave and
earnest intellect and feeling--so too, amidst the severer and statelier
texture of the once ambitious, laborious mind, which had conducted
Darrell to renown--amidst all that gathered-up intensity of passion,
which admitted no comedy into Sorrow, and saw in Love but the aspect of
Fate--amidst all this lofty seriousness of soul, there was yet a vivid
capacity of enjoyment--those fine sensibilities to the pleasurable
sun-rays of life, which are constitutional to all GENIUS, no matter how
grave its vocations. True, affliction at last may dull them, as it dulls
all else that we took from Nature when she equipped us for life. Yet,
in the mind of Darrell, affliction had shattered the things most gravely
coveted, even more than it had marred its perceptive acknowledgment of
the sympathies between fancies that move to smiles, and thoughts that
bequeath solemn lessons, or melt to no idle tears. Had Darrell been
placed amidst the circumstances that make happy the homes of earnest
men, Darrell would have been mirthful; had Waife been placed amongst the
circumstances that concentrate talent, and hedge round life with trained
thicksets and belting laurels, Waife would have been grave.

It was not in the earlier conferences that took place in Waife's
apartment that the subject which had led the old man to Fawley was
brought into discussion. When Waife had sought to introduce it--when,
after Sophy's arrival, he had looked wistfully into Darrell's face,
striving to read there the impression she had created, and, unable to
discover, had begun, with tremulous accents, to reopen the cause that
weighed on him--Darrell stopped him at once. "Hush--not yet; remember
that it was in the very moment you first broached this sorrowful topic,
on arriving here, and perceived how different the point of view from
which we two must regard it, that your nerves gave way--your illness
rushed on you. Wait, not only till you are stronger, but till we know
eac