erful
protector, "bringest thou tidings of IT? Thy cheerful eye tells me
that--no--no--thy face changes! They have destroyed it! Oh, that I could
be young once more!"

"What!" said the world-wise man, astonished. "If thou hadst another
youth, wouldst thou cherish the same delusion, and go again through a
life of hardship, persecution, and wrong?"

"My noble son," said the philosopher, "for hours when I have felt the
wrong, the persecution, and the hardship, count the days and the nights
when I felt only the hope and the glory and the joy! God is kinder to us
all than man can know; for man looks only to the sorrow on the surface,
and sees not the consolation in the deeps of the unwitnessed soul."

Sibyll had left Hastings by her father's side, and tripped lightly
to the farther part of the house, inhabited by the rustic owners who
supplied the homely service, to order the evening banquet,--the happy
banquet; for hunger gives not such flavour to the viand, nor thirst such
sparkle to the wine, as the presence of a beloved guest.

And as the courtier seated himself on the rude settle under the
honeysuckles that wreathed the porch, a delicious calm stole over his
sated mind. The pure soul of the student, released a while from the
tyranny of an earthly pursuit,--the drudgery of a toil, that however
grand, still but ministered to human and material science,--had found
for its only other element the contemplation of more solemn and eternal
mysteries. Soaring naturally, as a bird freed from a golden cage,
into the realms of heaven, he began now, with earnest and spiritual
eloquence, to talk of the things and visions lately made familiar to his
thoughts. Mounting from philosophy to religion, he indulged in his large
ideas upon life and nature: of the stars that now came forth in heaven;
of the laws that gave harmony to the universe; of the evidence of a God
in the mechanism of creation; of the spark from central divinity, that,
kindling in a man's soul, we call "genius;" of the eternal resurrection
of the dead, which makes the very principle of being, and types, in the
leaf and in the atom, the immortality of the great human race. He was
sublimer, that gray old man, hunted from the circle of his kind, in his
words, than ever is action in its deeds; for words can fathom truth, and
deeds but blunderingly and lamely seek it.

And the sad and gifted and erring intellect of Hastings, rapt from its
little ambition of the hour, had