Page:Henry Northcote (IA henrynorthcote00snairich).pdf/137

 unused native force, which had oppressed him like a nightmare during many nights and days, had been fused all at once into an immense fecundity of expression. Each minute blood-vessel that formed a web round the ball of crystallized energy that was his brain was big with its own peculiar, original, and special idea. The strangest vistas had opened before his eyes. His faculties in the first flush of their self-consciousness had grown insolent and overbearing.

How could a body of common citizens hope to stand against the battery that would be directed upon them! All the subtleties of the sophists, all the enthusiasms of the creeds would be as naught in the presence of such an overweening personal force. How could such insignificant fragments as these, the mere excrescences of the universal scheme, who could not make a mind among them, hope to retain the all-too-precarious standard of their probity when touched by the wand of the magician? He laughed aloud to the rain when his thoughts reverted to the two perplexed constables he had left at the bottom of Sydenham Hill; and how, in spite of the tentativeness of the effort, as his talent had mounted in him, so that presently its irresistible force had seemed even to surprise himself, these two stolid, unemotional Englishmen had nodded their heads in approval, and had hung breathless upon his words. Only one of God's great advocates could hope to perform that miracle under a gas-lamp in the wind-swept streets on a wet and chill winter's morning. The old mystics, delivering with a divine naïveté their surprising