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It is not in the showy evolutions of buildings, but in the multiplicity of human habitations which are crouded together, that the wonderful immensity of London consists. On Wednesday, July 6, he was engaged to sup with me at my lodgings in Downing-street, Westminster.
What an inexpressible weight such a silence adds to isolation! And yet it is not an unbroken silence, for then a shrill and harsh sound seems to grate upon the ear. It is as if in this muteness of nature, one could hear the motion of the earth on its axis; then, above his head, in the depths of immensity, the whirling of the celestial spheres and myriads of worlds which gravitate in space.
But this awakening of the spirit to the actualities of supernatural religion, this crossing of that dark immensity of space which appears to interpose between Almighty God and the mind of man, was new to him. He had sought a language of the soul which might effect an adjustment between the exterior and interior life. Here, in the Word made Flesh, with reverent amazement he found it.
In journeying thither from Centaurus I passed thousands of Solar Systems scattered in space all around me. As I was thus darting through immensity I glanced toward our own Solar System and could see nothing but a flickering star which was our Sun. Not the faintest sign could I see of our world or of Jupiter. A strange feeling passed over me when I began to realize how far I was from home.
"Through the exhaustion always accompanying such tension, when the soul is strained above the region which it naturally inhabits... the insufficiency of speech is felt for the first time by those who have studied it so much, and used it so well we are borne from all active, from all militant instincts to travel through boundless space to be lost in the immensity of adventurous courses far, far above the clouds... where we no longer see that the earth is beautiful, because our gaze is riveted upon the skies... where reality is no longer poetically draped, as has been so skilfully done by the author of Waverley, but where, in idealizing poetry itself, the infinite is peopled with the spirits belonging only to its mystic realm, as has been done by Byron in his Manfred."
The silence stretched unbroken; its immensity had swallowed and smothered the last echo of the rifle report and the grizzly's roar. There was no movement, seemingly no life, only the drifts and the winter forest and the futile sun, shining down between the snow-laden trees. Yet he knew vaguely what had occurred. The bullet had gone true.
It is not easy to conceive, how interesting a thing it looked in that round objectless desert of waters. I had associated such a feeling of immensity with the ocean, that I felt exceedingly disappointed, when I was out of sight of all land, at the narrowness and nearness, as it were, of the circle of the horizon. So little are images capable of satisfying the obscure feelings connected with words.
"Gentlemen, when I reflect that as much as £30,000,000 of money have been expended in one year in contending with foreign countries for objects of infinitely less importance to us." Lord Stuart I stated so infinitely of less importance than assisting to relieve an immensity of our fellow-countrymen from starvation.
And so, on January 24th, the Countess drives up to the Grand Balcon, the jewellers' shop in the Rue Vendome. Her dark eyes sparkle, the lovely, piquant face is wreathed in smiles. "Messieurs," she greets the anxious partners, "I think I can promise you that the necklace will very shortly be sold." The jewellers gasp in the immensity of the hope her words arouse.
And when his common sense warned him of their danger, and his conscience reproached him with leading her into it, he said to himself, "I can't help it if it is dangerous. It's been taken out of my hands. If somebody doesn't drag her out of doors, she'll get ill. If somebody doesn't talk to her she'll grow morbid. And there's nobody but me." He sheltered himself in the immensity of her tragedy.
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