One of Our Conquerors | Page 6

the Impossible was wings to imagination,

and heroic sculpture the simplest act of the chisel. It does not advance,
'tis true; it drives the whirligig circle round and round the single
existing central point; but it is enriched with applause of the boys and
girls of both ages in this land; and all the English critics heap their
honours on its brave old Simplicity: our national literary flag, which
signalizes us while we float, subsequently to flap above the shallows.
One may sigh for it. An ill-fortuned minstrel who has by fateful
direction been brought to see with distinctness, that man is not as much
comprised in external features as the monkey, will be devoted to the
task of the fuller portraiture.
After his ineffectual catching at the volatile idea, Mr. Radnor found
repose in thoughts of his daughter and her dear mother. They had
begged him to put on an overcoat this day of bitter wind, or a silken
kerchief for the throat. Faithful to the Spring, it had been his habit since
boyhood to show upon his person something of the hue of the vernal
month, the white of the daisied meadow, and although he owned a light
overcoat to dangle from shoulders at the Opera crush, he declined to
wear it for protection. His gesture of shaking and expanding whenever
the tender request was urged on him, signified a physical opposition to
the control of garments. Mechanically now, while doating in fancy over
the couple beseeching him, he loosened the button across his defaced
waistcoat, exposed a large measure of chest to flaws of a wind barbed
on Norwegian peaks by the brewers of cough and catarrh--horrid
women of the whistling clouts, in the pay of our doctors. He braved
them; he starved the profession. He was that man in fifty thousand who
despises hostile elements and goes unpunished, calmly erect among a
sneezing and tumbled host, as a lighthouse overhead of breezy fleets.
The coursing of his blood was by comparison electrical; he had not the
sensation of cold, other than that of an effort of the elements to arouse
him; and so quick was he, through this fine animation, to feel, think, act,
that the three successive tributaries of conduct appeared as an
irreflective flash and a gamester's daring in the vein to men who had no
deep knowledge of him and his lightning arithmetic for measuring,
sounding, and deciding.
Naturally he was among the happiest of human creatures; he willed it

so, with consent of circumstances; a boisterous consent, as when votes
are reckoned for a favourite candidate: excepting on the part of a small
band of black dissentients in a corner, a minute opaque body, devilish
in their irreconcilability, who maintain their struggle to provoke discord,
with a cry disclosing the one error of his youth, the sole bad step
chargeable upon his antecedents. But do we listen to them? Shall we
not have them turned out? He gives the sign for it; and he leaves his
buoying constituents to outroar them: and he tells a friend that it was
not, as one may say, an error, although an erratic step: but let us explain
to our bosom friend; it was a step quite unregretted, gloried in; a step
deliberately marked, to be done again, were the time renewed: it was a
step necessitated (emphatically) by a false preceding step; and having
youth to plead for it, in the first instance, youth and ignorance; and
secondly, and O how deeply truly! Love. Deep true love, proved by
years, is the advocate.
He tells himself at the same time, after lending ear to the advocate's
exordium and a favourite sentence, that, judged by the Powers (to them
only can he expose the whole skeleton-cupboard of the case), judged by
those clear-sighted Powers, he is exonerated.
To be exonerated by those awful Powers, is to be approved.
As to that, there is no doubt: whom they, all-seeing, discerning as they
do, acquit they justify.
Whom they justify, they compliment.
They, seeing all the facts, are not unintelligent of distinctions, as the
world is.
What, to them, is the spot of the error?--admitting it as an error. They
know it for a thing of convention, not of Nature. We stand forth to
plead it in proof of an adherence to Nature's laws: we affirm, that far
from a defilement, it is an illumination and stamp of nobility. On the
beloved who shares it with us, it is a stamp of the highest nobility. Our
world has many ways for signifying its displeasure, but it cannot brand
an angel.

This was another favourite sentence of Love's grand oration for the
defence. So seductive was it to the Powers who sat in judgement on the
case, that they all, when the