yet his face is as bright and cheerful as the face of the morning
itself; and what do you think he is singing? "Hail Columbia, happy
land," at the top of his lungs! The birds are merrily wheeling
over his head, and diving through the air, and moving here and
there as freely as the wind, yet not one among them carries a
lighter heart than that which he is jerking along by the side of
the little crutch.

As I see how cheerfully he bears the burden of his hopeless
halting, there comes back to me the story of the lame lord who
sang a different sort of song--the lame lord who died at
Missolonghi, and whose friend Trelawny--human jackal that he was--
stole to his bedside after the breath had left his body, and
examined his clubbed feet, and then went away and wrote about
them. Here was a man with regal gifts of mind--a poet of splendid
genius--a titled aristocrat--a man admired and praised wherever
the English language was read--a man who knew that he held within
himself the power to make his name immortal--a man with wealth
sufficient for all grateful luxuries--yet with clubbed feet; and
those feet! Ah! how they embittered and spoiled that man of
magnificent achievements and sublime possibilities! It would
appear, from the disgusting narrative of Mr. Trelawny, that he was
in reality the only man who had ever seen Byron's feet. Those feet
had been kept so closely hidden, or so cunningly disguised, that
nobody had known their real deformity; and the poor lord who had
carried them through his thirty-six years of life, had done it in
constantly tormented and mortified pride. Those misshapen organs
had an important agency in making him a misanthropic, morbidly
sensitive, unhappy, desperate man. When he sang, he did not forget
them; and the poor fools who turned down their shirt-collars, and