half-past six. It was prayer-meeting night, and she never missed
going. Zachariah generally accompanied her, but he was not quite
presentable, and stayed at home. He went on with the Corsair, and as
he read his heart warmed, and he unconsciously found himself
declaiming several of the most glowing and eloquent lines aloud. He
was by nature a poet; essentially so, for he loved everything which
lifted him above what is commonplace. Isaiah, Milton, a storm, a
revolution, a great passion--with these he was at home; and his
education, mainly on the Old Testament, contributed greatly to the
development both of the strength and weakness of his character. For
such as he are weak as well as strong; weak in the absence of the
innumerable little sympathies and worldlinesses which make life
delightful, and but too apt to despise and tread upon those gentle
flowers which are as really here as the sun and the stars, and are
nearer to us. Zachariah found in the Corsair exactly what answered
to his own inmost self, down to its very depths. The lofty style,
the scorn of what is mean and base, the courage--root of all virtue--
that dares and evermore dares in the very last extremity, the love of
the illimitable, of freedom, and the cadences like the fall of waves
on a sea-shore were attractive to him beyond measure. More than
this, there was Love. His own love was a failure, and yet it was
impossible for him to indulge for a moment his imagination elsewhere.
The difference between him and his wife might have risen to absolute
aversion, and yet no wandering fancy would ever have been encouraged
towards any woman living. But when he came to Medora's song:


"Deep in my soul that tender secret dwells,
Lonely and lost to light for evermore,
Save when to thine my heart responsive swells,