character. There is no secret for discovering the human heart like
affliction, especially the affliction which springs from passion. Does a
writer startle you with his insight into your nature, be sure that he has
mourned; such lore is the alchemy of tears. Hence the insensible and
almost universal confusion of idea which confounds melancholy with depth,
and finds but hollow inanity in the symbol of a laugh. Pitiable error!
Reflection first leads us to gloom, but its next stage is to brightness.
The Laughing Philosopher had reached the goal of Wisdom; Heraclitus
whimpered at the starting-post. But enough for Lucy to gain even the
vestibule of philosophy.

Notwithstanding the soreness we naturally experience towards all who
pertinaciously arouse an unpleasant subject, and in spite therefore of
Brandon's furtherance of Mauleverer's courtship, Lucy felt herself
inclined strangely, and with something of a daughter's affection, towards
this enigmatical being; in spite, too, of all the cold and measured vice
of his character,--the hard and wintry grayness of heart with which he
regarded the welfare of others, or the substances of Truth, Honour, and
Virtue,--the callousness of his fossilized affections, which no human
being softened but for a moment, and no warm and healthful impulse
struck, save into an evanescent and idle flash;--in spite of this
consummate obduracy and worldliness of temperament, it is not paradoxical
to say that there was something in the man which Lucy found at times
analogous to her own vivid and generous self. This was, however, only
noticeable when she led him to talk over earlier days, and when by
degrees the sarcastic lawyer forgot the present, and grew eloquent, not
over the actions, but the feelings of the past. He would speak to her
for hours of his youthful dreams, his occupations, or his projects, as a
boy. Above all, he loved to converse with her upon Warlock, its remains
of ancient magnificence, the green banks of the placid river that