c brain which will ever be pressing to
cast its shadows: the heart is clearer and truer.

He multiplied images, projected visions, nestled in his throbs to drug
and dance his brain. He snatched at the beauty of a day that outrolled
the whole Alpine hand-in-hand of radiant heaven-climbers for an
assurance of predestined celestial beneficence; and again, shadowily
thoughtful of the littleness of the thing he exalted and claimed,
he staked his reason on the positive blessing to come to him before
nightfall, telling himself calmly that he did so because there would
be madness in expecting it otherwise: he asked for so little! Since
he asked for so little, to suppose that it would not be granted was
irrational. None but a very coward could hesitate to stake his all on
the issue.

Singularly small indeed the other aims in life appeared by comparison
with this one, but his intellect, in the act of pleading excuses for his
impatience, distinguished why it should be so. The crust, which is not
much, is everything to the starving beggar; and he was eager for the
crust that he might become sound and whole again, able to give their
just proportion to things, as at present he acknowledged himself hardly
able to do. He could not pursue two thoughts on a political question,
or grasp the idea of a salutary energy in the hosts animated by his
leadership. There would have to be an end of it speedily, else men might
name him worthless dog!

Morning swam on the lake in her beautiful nakedness, a wedding of white
and blue, of purest white and bluest blue. Alvan crossed the island
bridges when the sun had sprung on his shivering fair prey, to make
the young fresh Morning rosy, and was glittering along the smooth
lake-waters. Workmen only were abroad, and Alvan was glad to be out with
them to feel with them as one of them. Close beside him the vivid genius
of the preceding century, whose love of workmen was a salt of heaven
in his human corruptness, looked down on the lake in marble. Alvan
cherished a worship of him as of one that had first thrilled him with
the feeling of our common humanity, with the tenderness for the poor,
with the knowledge of our frailty. Him, as well as the great Englishman
and a Frenchman, his mind called Father, and his conscience replied to
that progenitor's questioning of him, but said 'You know the love of
woman: He loved indeed, but he was not an amatory trifler. He too was
a worker, a champion worker. He doat