wing on which we mount to heaven." So, in his faculties themselves there
were singular inequalities, or contradictions. His power of memory in
some things seemed prodigious, but when examined it was seldom accurate;
it could apprehend, but did not hold together with a binding grasp what
metaphysicians call "complex ideas." He thus seemed unable to put it to
any steadfast purpose in the sciences of which it retained, vaguely and
loosely, many recondite principles. For the sublime and beautiful in
literature lie had no taste whatever. A passionate lover of nature, his
imagination had no response to the arts by which nature is expressed or
idealized; wholly unaffected by poetry or painting. Of the fine arts,
music alone attracted and pleased him. His conversation was often
eminently suggestive, touching on much, whether in books or mankind, that
set one thinking; but I never remember him to have uttered any of those
lofty or tender sentiments which form the connecting links between youth
and genius; for if poets sing to the young, and the young hail their own
interpreters in poets, it is because the tendency of both is to idealize
the realities of life,--finding everywhere in the real a something that is
noble or fair, and making the fair yet fairer, and the noble nobler still.

In Margrave's character there seemed no special vices, no special virtues;
but a wonderful vivacity, joyousness, animal good-humour. He was
singularly temperate, having a dislike to wine, perhaps from that purity
of taste which belongs to health absolutely perfect. No healthful child
likes alcohol; no animal, except man, prefers wine to water.

But his main moral defect seemed to me in a want of sympathy, even where
he professed attachment. He who could feel so acutely for himself, be
unmanned by the bite of a squirrel, and sob at the thought that he should
one day die, was as callous to the sufferings of another as a deer who
deserts and butts from him a wounded comrade.