d--to revere: in this inclination
lies the source of religion, of loyalty, and also of the worship and
immortality which are rendered so cheerfully to the great of old. And
in truth, it is a divine pleasure to admire! admiration seems in some
measure to appropriate to ourselves the qualities it honours in others.
We wed,--we root ourselves to the natures we so love to contemplate,
and their life grows a part of our own. Thus, when a great man, who has
engrossed our thoughts, our conjectures, our homage, dies, a gap seems
suddenly left in the world; a wheel in the mechanism of our own being
appears abruptly stilled; a portion of ourselves, and not our worst
portion, for how many pure, high, generous sentiments it contains, dies
with him! Yes! it is this love, so rare, so exalted, and so denied to
all ordinary men, which is the especial privilege of greatness, whether
that greatness be shewn in wisdom, in enterprise, in virtue, or even,
till the world learns better, in the more daring and lofty order of
crime. A Socrates may claim it to-day--a Napoleon to-morrow; nay, a
brigand chief, illustrious in the circle in which he lives, may call it
forth no less powerfully than the generous failings of a Byron, or the
sublime excellence of the greater Milton.

Lester saw with evident complacency the passion growing up between
his friend and his daughter; he looked upon it as a tie that would
permanently reconcile Aram to the hearth of social and domestic life; a
tie that would constitute the happiness of his daughter, and secure to
himself a relation in the man he felt most inclined, of all he knew, to
honour and esteem. He remarked in the gentleness and calm temper of
Aram much that was calculated to ensure domestic peace, and knowing
the peculiar disposition of Madeline, he felt that she was exactly the
person, not only to bear with the peculiarities of the Student, but to
venerate their source. In short, the more he contemplated the idea of
this alliance, the more he was charmed with its probability.

Musing on this subject, the good Squire was one day walking in his
garden, when he perceived his nephew at some distance, and remarked that
Walter, on seeing him, was about, instead of coming forward to meet him,
to turn down an alley in an opposite direction.

A little pained at this, and remembering that Walter had of late seemed
estranged from himself, and greatly altered from the high and cheerful
spirits natural to his tem