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Wintry as his prospects were, the sun still shone overhead; his courage never failed him; he never gave way to weak repining; and when he entered those halls, when he saw the deep fire in the eyes of Webster, and heard the superb thunder of his voice, when he listened to the witty and terrible invectives of Randolph, that "meteor of Congress," as Benton calls him, and watched the electric effect of the "long and skinny forefinger" pointed and shaken, when charmed by this speaker, or convinced by that, or roused to indignation by another, there was kindled a sense of power within his own breast, a fire prophetic of his future.
And as time crept on at a snail pace the howling of the wintry gale continued unabated, with the roar of the wind through the tree-tops ashore, the dash of the waves on the point above, and the constant wabbling motion of the shanty-boat to remind them of their peril.
He had scarcely been there a moment when three blows were struck on the door after the manner of the free-masons; first two strokes and then one. The door was opened immediately. A man wrapped in a cloak was sharply defined against the grayish atmosphere of the wintry night. As for Roland, he was completely hidden in shadow. Seeing no one, the man in the cloak remained motionless for a second.
It was the attitude of one who fully realizes the nature of his actions, of one who shrinks from the light of honest purpose and prefers the obscure recesses of his own moral darkness. Then with an effort he pulled himself together; he gripped his nerve. The next moment he flung wide the door. A flood of wintry sunshine suffused the interior of the dugout.
Then the time to call on God to spare, protect, and bless the dear, defenseless, helpless ones at home. Then the time for high resolves; to read to himself his duty; to "re-enlist for the war." Then his heart grew to his comrades, his general, and his country; and as the trees, swept by the wintry winds, moaned around him, the soldier slept and dreamed, and dreamed of home, sweet home.
The morning was as lovely as pure wintry air and cloudless sunbeams could render it; but rendered far lovelier still by our procession, if I may so call it, which was well calculated to awaken the most pleasurable feelings.
But softly falling through the pathless air comes a voice murmuring, "Here! Here! Come up hither!" Oh, these luminous hours! These hours of deeper conviction are life's real hours! Summer is sunshine and beauty, not storm and snow. There are dark and wintry days in March, when spring seems a delusion. There are days in April so cold that summer seems a snare.
'What a man! sighed the landlady, as she watched the Goshawk lead off along the banks; 'courtly as a knight, open as a squire, and gentle as a page! A league behind Andernach, and more in the wintry circle of the sun than Laach, its convenient monastic neighbour, stood the castle of Werner, the Robber Baron.
The sight was not less a rapture to him that he was himself the prey of the same practical joke from the passing years. The hair which the years had wholly swept from some of those thoughtful brows, or left spindling autumnal spears, "or few or none," to "shake against the cold," had whitened to a wintry snow on his, while his mustache had kept its youthful black.
Idly he turned over the leaves of a first edition of Tennyson's poems, pausing here and there to glance at a favourite lyric or con over a well-remembered verse, when the echo of a silvery horn blown clear on the wintry silence startled him out of his semi-abstraction.
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