ut mainly that men
might regard him for his goodness and nobility; hence his practical
notion of the good was weak, and of the noble, paltry. His one
desire in doing anything, was to be approved of or admired in the
same--approved of in the opinions he held, in the plans he pursued,
in the doctrines he taught; admired in the poems in which he went
halting after Byron, and in the eloquence with which he meant one
day to astonish great congregations. There was nothing original as
yet discoverable in him; nothing to deliver him from the poor
imitative apery in which he imagined himself a poet. He did possess
one invaluable gift--that of perceiving and admiring more than a
little, certain forms of the beautiful; but it was rendered merely
ridiculous by being conjoined with the miserable ambition--poor as
that of any mountebank emperor--to be himself admired for that
admiration. He mistook also sensibility for faculty, nor perceived
that it was at best but a probable sign that he might be able to do
something or other with pleasure, perhaps with success. If any one
judge it hard that men should be made with ambitions to whose
objects they can never attain, I answer, ambition is but the evil
shadow of aspiration; and no man ever followed the truth, which is
the one path of aspiration, and in the end complained that he had
been made this way or that. Man is made to be that which he is made
most capable of desiring--but it goes without saying that he must
desire the thing itself and not its shadow. Man is of the truth,
and while he follows a lie, no indication his nature yields will
hold, except the fear, the discontent, the sickness of soul, that
tell him he is wrong. If he say, "I care not for what you call the
substance--it is to me the shadow; I want what you call the shadow,"
the only answer is, that, to all eternity, he can never have it: a
shadow can never be had.

Ginevra was hardly the same child after the experience of that
terrible morning. At no time very much at home with her father,
something had now come between them, to remove which all her
struggles to love him as before were unavailing. The father was too
stupid, too unsympathetic, to take note of the look of fear that
crossed her face if ever he addressed her suddenly; and when she was
absorbed in fighting the thoughts that would come, he took her
constraint for sullenness.

With a cold spot in his heart where once had dwelt some genuine
regard