"You will be so good as to sit still, and hear me out. I have a right to all my charming, rose-colored views of this world. I have gone to and fro on the earth, and life has proved a Barmecide's banquet of just thirty-eight years' duration."
"But, sir, you lacked the patience and resolution of Shacabac, or, like him, you would have finally grasped the splendid realities. The world must be conquered, held in bondage to God's law and man's reason, before we can hope to levy tribute that will support our moral and mental natures; and it is only when humanity finds itself in the inverted order of serfdom to the world, that it dwarfs its capacities, and even then dies of famine."
The scornful gleam died out of his eyes, and mournful compassion stole in.
"Ah! how impetuously youth springs to the battlefield of life! Hope exorcises the gaunt spectre of defeat, and fancy fingers unwon trophies and fadeless bays; but slow-stepping experience, pallid, blood-stained, spent with toil, lays her icy hand on the rosy veil that floats before bright, brave, young eyes, and lo' the hideous wreck, the bleaching bones, the grinning, ghastly horrors that strew the scene of combat! No burnished eagles nor streaming banners, neither spoils of victory nor paeans of triumph, only silence and gloom and death—slow-sailing vultures—and a voiceless desolation! Oh, child! if you would find a suitable type of that torn and trampled battlefield—the human heart—when vice and virtue, love and hate, revenge and remorse, have wrestled fiercely for the mastery—go back to your Tacitus, and study there the dismal picture of that lonely Teutoburgium, where Varus and his legions went down in the red burial of battle! You talk of 'conquering the world—holding it in bondage!' What do you know of its perils and subtle temptations—of the glistening quicksands whose smooth lips already gape to engulf you? The very vilest fiend in hell might afford to pause and pity your delusion ere turning to machinations destined to rouse you rudely from your silly dreams. Ah! you remind me of a little innocent, happy child, playing on some shining beach, when the sky is quiet, the winds are hushed, and all things wrapped in rest, save
'The water lapping on the crag,
And the long ripple washing in the reeds'—
a fair, fearless child, gathering polished pearly shells with which to build fairy palaces, and suddenly, as she catches the mournful murmur of the immemorial sea, that echoes in the flushed and folded chambers of the stranded shells, her face pales with awe and wonder—the childish lips part, the childish eyes are strained to discover the mystery; and while the whispering monotone admonishes of howling storms and sinking argosies, she smiles and listens, sees only the glowing carmine of the fluted reels, hears only the magic music of the sea sirens—and the sky blackens, the winds leap to their track of ruin, the great deep rises wrathful and murderous, bellowing for victims, and Cyclone reigns? Thundering waves sweep over and bear away the frail palaces that decked the strand, and even while the shell symphony still charms the ear, the child's rosy feet are washed from their sandy resting-place; she is borne on howling billows far out to a lashed and maddened main, strewn with human drift; and numb with horror she sinks swiftly to a long and final rest among purple algae! Even so, Edna, you stop your ears with shells, and my warning falls like snow-flakes that melt and vanish on the bosom of a stream.
"No, sirs I am willing to be advised. Against what would you warn me?"
"The hollowness of life, the fatuity of your hopes, the treachery of that human nature of which you speak so tenderly and reverently. So surely as you put faith in the truth and nobility of humanity, you will find it as soft-lipped and vicious as Paolo Orsini, who folded his wife, Isabella de Medici, most lovingly in his arms, and while he tenderly pressed her to his heart, slipped a cord around her neck and strangled her."
"I know, sir, that human nature is weak, selfish, sinful—that such treacherous monsters as Ezzolino and the Visconti have stained the annals of our race with blood-blotches, which the stream of time will never efface; but the law of compensation operates here as well as in other departments, and brings to light a 'fidus Achates' and Antoninus. I believe that human nature is a curious amalgam of meanness, malice and magnanimity, and that an earnest, loving Christian charity is the only safe touchstone, and furnishes (if you will tolerate the simile) the only elective affinity in moral chemistry. Because ingots are not dug out of the earth, is it not equally unwise and ungrateful to ridicule and denounce the hopeful, patient, tireless laborers who handle the alloy and ultimately disintegrate the precious metal? Even if the world were bankrupt in morality and religion—which, thank God, it is not—one grand shining example, like Mr. Hammond, whose unswerving consistency, noble charity, and sublime unselfishness all concede and revere, ought to leaven the mass of sneering cynics, and win them to a belief in their capacity for rising to pure, holy, almost perfect lives."
"Spare me a repetition of the rhapsodies of Madame Guyon! I am not surprised that such a novice as you prove yourself should, in the stereotyped style of orthodoxy, swear by the hoary Tartuffe, that hypocritical wolf, Allan Hammond—"