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This is one of the roads open to you; it is the stony path of virtue, dreary and tiresome. The second path is the flowery one. You may throw yourself upon the waves of life, drink deep of the cup of pleasure, not troubling yourself with scruples as to what is allowed and what forbidden. Your youth, beauty, and wealth will carry you up to the pinnacle of pleasure only beware of the consequences!
It was a splendid world. From the tall pinnacle of rock on which they stood it looked like a great sea of sunlight, with only here and there patches of white snow where the winter winds had piled it deep. Their ridge rose up out of a great valley.
The woman's face had flushed a little at her offer: it now paled again. "As you will," she said, and as she spoke there came the noise of shouting, singing and trampling feet outside. The poet dropped in a moment from the dizzy pinnacle of dreamland to the calm valley of a commonplace world. "These are my friends returning," he said. "They mustn't see you. Come this way."
It was sufficient to know that a hand had suddenly drawn him from the abyss, had put him on this pinnacle beyond all, had placed him in Anna Gessner's home as the first-born, there to embark upon a career whose goal lay beyond the City Beautiful of his dreams.
On entering, according to the instructions of the King-at-Arms afterwards renewed by his sponsors he had bowed to the throne. Thus all was over. He was a peer. That pinnacle, under the glory of which he had, all his life, seen his master, Ursus, bow himself down in fear that prodigious pinnacle was under his feet. He was in that place, so dark and yet so dazzling in England.
The by-lanes and narrower streets were quite filled up with rubbish, nor could one have known where he was but by the ruins of some church or hall that had some remarkable tower or pinnacle remaining.
The mesa, when they reached the pinnacle and looked down over the wide expanse of it, glimmered like clear, running water with the heat waves that rose from the sand.
Thus, at least, he was up one day on a pinnacle, admired and envied by all; and the next, though still but a boy, he was publicly disgraced. The blow would have broken a less finely tempered spirit; and even him I suppose it rendered reckless; for he took flight to London, and there, in a fast club, disposed of the bulk of his considerable patrimony in the space of one winter.
However, he thought it must be something past ten o'clock, so he slipped himself off his pinnacle, or was in the act of doing so, when he missed his hold and went off with a sudden jerk. Something scraped the whole length of his back, and seemed to hold him in a relentless grip.
Him the historian describes as one of those "mighty ones who has preserved to the end of his career the statesman's tact of discriminating between the possible and the impossible, and has not broken down in the task which for greatly gifted natures is the most difficult of all the task of recognizing, when on the pinnacle of success, its natural limits.
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