“Yes—air—air!” repeated Adam, rising.
Sibyll placed his bonnet over his silvered locks, drew his gown more closely round him, and slowly and in silence they left the chamber, and took their way across the court to the ramparts of the fortress-palace.
The day was calm and genial, with a low but fresh breeze stirring gently through the warmth of noon. The father and child seated themselves on the parapet, and saw, below, the gay and numerous vessels that glided over the sparkling river, while the dark walls of Baynard’s Castle, the adjoining bulwark and battlements of Montfichet, and the tall watch-tower of Warwick’s mighty mansion frowned in the distance against the soft blue sky. “There,” said Adam, quietly, and pointing to the feudal roofs, “there seems to rise power, and yonder (glancing to the river), yonder seems to flow Genius! A century or so hence the walls shall vanish, but the river shall roll on. Man makes the castle, and founds the power,—God forms the river and creates the Genius. And yet, Sibyll, there may be streams as broad and stately as yonder Thames, that flow afar in the waste, never seen, never heard by man. What profits the river unmarked; what the genius never to be known?”
It was not a common thing with Adam Warner to be thus eloquent. Usually silent and absorbed, it was not his gift to moralize or declaim. His soul must be deeply moved before the profound and buried sentiment within it could escape into words.
Sibyll pressed her father’s hand, and, though her own heart was very heavy, she forced her lips to smile and her voice to soothe. Adam interrupted her.
“Child, child, ye women know not what presses darkest and most bitterly on the minds of men. You know not what it is to form out of immaterial things some abstract but glorious object,—to worship, to serve it, to sacrifice to it, as on an altar, youth, health, hope, life,—and suddenly in old age to see that the idol was a phantom, a mockery, a shadow laughing us to scorn, because we have sought to clasp it.”
“Oh, yes, Father, women have known that illusion.”
“What! Do they study?”
“No, Father, but they feel!”
“Feel! I comprehend thee not.”