Page:Paul Clifford Vol 3.djvu/314

306, but ineffectually, to pull it. The right side of his face was partially distorted, as by convulsion or paralysis; but not sufficiently so to destroy that remarkable expression of loftiness and severity which had characterised the features in life. At the same time, the distortion which had drawn up on one side the muscles of the mouth, had deepened into a startling broadness the half sneer of derision that usually lurked around the lower part of his face. Thus, unwitnessed and abrupt, had been the disunion of the clay and spirit of a man who, if he passed through life a bold, scheming, stubborn, unwavering hypocrite, was not without something high even amidst his baseness, his selfishness, and his vices; who seems less by nature to have loved sin, than by some strange perversion of reason to have disdained virtue, and who, by a solemn and awful suddenness of fate, (for who shall venture to indicate the judgment of the arch and unseen Providence, even when it appears to mortal eye the least obscured,) won the dreams, the objects, the triumphs of hope, to be blasted by them at the moment of acquisition!