looking into the past."

The past!--Was it not true? That home to whose porch came in time the
Black Horses, in time just to save from the last worst dishonour, but
not save from years racked by each pang that can harrow man's dignity
in each daily assault on the fort of man's pride; the sly treacherous
daughter--her terrible marriage--the man whose disgrace she had linked
to her blood, and whose life was still insult and threat to his own.
True, what a war upon Pride! And even in that secret and fatal love
which had been of all his griefs the most influential and enduring, had
his pride been less bitterly wounded, and that pride less enthroned in
his being, would his grief have been so relentless, his attempts at
its conquest so vain? And then, even now--what was it said, "I can
bless?"--holy LOVE! What was it said, "but not pardon"?--stern PRIDE!
And so onto these last revolutions of sterile life. Was he not miserable
in Lionel's and Sophy's misery? Forlorn in that Citadel of Pride--closed
round and invested with Sorrows--and the last hopes that had fled to the
fortress, slain in defence of its outworks. With hand shading his face,
Darrell remained some minutes silent. At last he raised his head, and
his eye was steadfast, his lip firm.

"George Morley," said he, "I acknowledge much justice in the censure you
have conveyed, with so artful a delicacy that, if it fail to reform, it
cannot displease, and leaves much to be seriously revolved in solitary
self-commune. But though I may own that pride is not made for man, and
that in the blindness of human judgment I may often have confounded
pride with duty, and suffered for the mistake, yet that one prevailing
object of my life, which with so startling a truth you say it has
pleased Heaven to frustrate, I cannot hold an error in itself. You have
learned enough from your uncle, seen enough of me yourself, to know what
that object has been. You are scholar enough to concede to me that it
is no ignoble homage which either nations or persons render to the
ancestral Dead--that homage is an instinct in all but vulgar and sordid
natures. Has a man no ancestry of his own--rightly and justly, if
himself of worth, he appropriates to his lineage all the heroes, and
bards, and patriots of his fatherland! A free citizen has ancestors
in all the glorious chiefs that have adorned the State, on the sole
condition that he shall revere their tombs and guard their memory as
a son! And thus