is own this instant,
confounding him with an accusation of madness for rejecting her. Why
had he done it? Surely women, weak women, must be at times divinely
inspired. She warned him against the step. But he, proud of his armoury,
went his way. He choked, he suffered the torture of the mailed Genoese
going under; worse, for the drowner's delirium swirls but a minute in
the gaping brain, while he had to lie all, night at the mercy of the
night.

He was only calmer when morning came. Night has little mercy for the
self-reproachful, and for a strong man denouncing the folly of his
error, it has none. The bequest of the night was a fever of passion; and
upon that fever the light of morning cleared his head to weigh the force
opposing him. He gnawed the paradox, that it was huge because it was
petty, getting a miserable sour sustenance out of his consciousness of
the position it explained. Great enemies, great undertakings, would have
revived him as they had always revived and fortified. But here was a
stolid small obstacle, scarce assailable on its own level; and he had
chosen that it should be attacked through its own laws and forms. By
shutting a door, by withholding an answer to his knocks, the thing
reduced him to hesitation. And the thing had weapons to shoot at him;
his history, his very blood, stood open to its shafts; and the sole
quality of a giant, which he could show to front it, was the breath of
one for a mark.

These direct perceptions of the circumstances were played on by the
fever he drew from his Fiesco bed. Accuracy of vision in our crises is
not so uncommon as the proportionate equality of feeling: we do indeed.
frequently see with eyes of just measurement while we are conducting
ourselves like madmen. The facts are seen, and yet the spinning nerves
will change their complexion; and without enlarging or minimizing,
they will alternate their effect on us immensely through the colour
presenting them now sombre, now hopeful: doing its work of extravagance
upon perceptibly plain matter. The fitful colour is the fever. He must
win her, for he never yet had failed--he had lost her by his folly! She
was his--she was torn from him! She would come at his bidding--she
would cower to her tyrants! The thought of her was life and death in his
frame, bright heaven and the abyss. At one beat of the heart she swam
to his arms, at another he was straining over darkness. And whose the
fault?

He rose out of his amazem