Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 096.djvu/448

432 in the brains of his neighbours, by his strange revelations—"new truth being as heady as new wine"—and how Emersonians sprang up and multiplied, queer and affected mortals, who took upon themselves to be important agents of the world;s destiny, yet were simply bores of a very intense water. "Such, I imagine," appropriately adds the Blithedale Romancer and Scarlet Letter-writer, "such is the invariable character of persons who crowd so closely about an original thinker, as to draw in his unuttered breath, and thus become imbued with a false originality. This triteness of novelty is enough to make any man, of common sense, blaspheme at all ideas of less than a century's standing; and pray that the world may be petrified and rendered immovable, in precisely the worst moral and physical state that it ever yet arrived at, rather than be benefited by such schemes of such philosophers." The Professor Windrush clan are unquestionably de trop, whatever we may think of their ''chef. He, perchance, is a lion, whose genius—shaggy and forest-like as it is—can command the summons, “Let him roar again, ler him roar again." But they,'' his self-constituted satellites, are but jackals to his majesty, and, as such, fair game to clerical Nimrods like Mr. Kingsley, albeit his present heat in the chase is not accounted, by some of them, "wondrous kind" in one who was supposed, with or without reason, to have a "fellow feeling" with their pack.

shuffled his chair, thinking it monstrously ridiculous that his friend Captain Sommerton could have entertained notions of an alliance with a stranger—a person in all probability without fortune, of no connexion, who might indeed, for aught he knew, be an individual of dubious character. To marry any one without the mention of parchments! thought Godfrey—and in the army, too! In his younger days, when they were brothers in arms, he always thought Tom Sommerton to be possessed of sense. Spenser was, indeed, roused by it, and he evinced some of that restless impatience which children manifest as they listen to a ghost story. The colonel went on:

Well, I got into bed, but not to sleep so soundly as I had done on the night before, nor dream of merry England, and the sunny days which the coming summer in its course would bring. Nothing could I think of but Madeline; 1 saw in fancy those features formed to beauty—that being who, in a few short hours had stolen away my heart—(here the colonel heaved a sigh)—this heart which till then had never felt the influence—the power of love! When grey-eyed morning streamed its pale beams through the little window of my berth, tired nature sank into the oblivious arms of repose. In the brief slumber I was by the side of Madeline, with her who was the haunting spirit of my waking thoughts, and who was shadowed first by busy dreams.