But Wilfrid now encountered the wall of brass for which he had been
seeking up and down the earth. He went impetuously to Seraphita,
meaning to express the whole force and bearing of a passion under
which he bounded like the fabled horse beneath the iron horseman, firm
in his saddle, whom nothing moves while the efforts of the fiery
animal only made the rider heavier and more solid. He sought her to
relate his life,--to prove the grandeur of his soul by the grandeur of
his faults, to show the ruins of his desert. But no sooner had he
crossed her threshold, and found himself within the zone of those eyes
of scintillating azure, that met no limits forward and left none
behind, than he grew calm and submissive, as a lion, springing on his
prey in the plains of Africa, receives from the wings of the wind a
message of love, and stops his bound. A gulf opened before him, into
which his frenzied words fell and disappeared, and from which uprose a
voice which changed his being; he became as a child, a child of
sixteen, timid and frightened before this maiden with serene brow,
this white figure whose inalterable calm was like the cruel
impassibility of human justice. The combat between them had never
ceased until this evening, when with a glance she brought him down, as
a falcon making his dizzy spirals in the air around his prey causes it
to fall stupefied to earth, before carrying it to his eyrie.

We may note within ourselves many a long struggle the end of which is
one of our own actions,--struggles which are, as it were, the reverse
side of humanity. This reverse side belongs to God; the obverse side
to men. More than once Seraphita had proved to Wilfrid that she knew
this hidden and ever varied side, which is to the majority of men a
second being. Often she said to him in her dove-like voice: "Why all
this vehemence?" when on his way to her he had sworn she should be