when there was nothing to be said; but pertinent, wise, sincere, when he
did speak; always throwing light on the matter. This is the only sort of
speech _worth_ speaking! Through life we find him to have been regarded as
an altogether solid, brotherly, genuine man. A serious, sincere character;
yet amiable, cordial, companionable, jocose even;--a good laugh in him
withal: there are men whose laugh is as untrue as anything about them; who
cannot laugh. One hears of Mahomet's beauty: his fine sagacious honest
face, brown florid complexion, beaming black eyes;--I somehow like too that
vein on the brow, which swelled up black when he was in anger: like the
"_horseshoe_ vein" in Scott's _Redgauntlet_. It was a kind of feature in
the Hashem family, this black swelling vein in the brow; Mahomet had it
prominent, as would appear. A spontaneous, passionate, yet just,
true-meaning man! Full of wild faculty, fire and light; of wild worth, all
uncultured; working out his life-task in the depths of the Desert there.

How he was placed with Kadijah, a rich Widow, as her Steward, and travelled
in her business, again to the Fairs of Syria; how he managed all, as one
can well understand, with fidelity, adroitness; how her gratitude, her
regard for him grew: the story of their marriage is altogether a graceful
intelligible one, as told us by the Arab authors. He was twenty-five; she
forty, though still beautiful. He seems to have lived in a most
affectionate, peaceable, wholesome way with this wedded benefactress;
loving her truly, and her alone. It goes greatly against the impostor
theory, the fact that he lived in this entirely unexceptionable, entirely
quiet and commonplace way, till the heat of his years was done. He was
forty before he talked of any mission from Heaven. All his irregularities,
real and supposed, date from after his fiftieth year, when the good Kadijah
died. All his "ambition," seemingly, had been, hitherto, to live an honest
life; his "fame," the mere good opinion of neighbors that knew him, had
been sufficient hitherto. Not till he was already getting old, the