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Why, the poor old crone is restless in a strange land, and yearns to lay her bones, she says, among her people in the old graveyard at home: and so they go to pay her passage back: and God help her and them, and every simple heart, and all who turn to the Jerusalem of their younger days, and have an altar-fire upon the cold hearth of their fathers.
We are to conceive it, at present, as a principal light of life to the young heart at Reinsberg; a cheerful new fire, almost an altar-fire, irradiating the common dusk for him there. Of another Correspondence, beautifully irradiative for the young heart, we must say almost nothing: the Correspondence with Suhm.
If the Parthians are devastating the frontier along the Euphrates and the Marcommani and the Quadi are storming the outposts along the Danube and the Rhine, perhaps that is because my presence in the Atrium is an offence in the eyes of Vesta, my prayers an affront to my Goddess, my care of her altar-fire an insult to her. I tremble to think of it. And I cannot get it out of my head.
As soon as he was gone the arrangement for the procession began, the slaves lit their torches and grouped themselves outside the house-door, the flute players struck up a tune, Flexinna's thirteen-year-old boy lit his white-thorn torch at the altar-fire, her eleven-year-old and nine-year-old, as pages of honor, caught Brinnaria by the hands and led her out at the door.
She is one of the pillars of the eternal kingdom of right. She is a star shining in the moral firmament. She is a princess administering at the fountains of life. Every prayer she breathes is answered to a greater or less extent in the hearts and lives of those she loves. Her piety is an altar-fire where religion acquires strength to go out on its merciful mission.
She had discovered that the dawning inclination on which she had bestowed a few dreamings and sighings, trying, in foolish girlish fashion, to fan a chance tinder-spark into the holy altar-fire of a woman's first love had gone out in darkness, and that her free heart lay quiet, in a sort of twilight shade, waiting for its destiny; nor for the last few days had she even thought of Nathanael.
Perhaps it is true, and not an invention, that Marcus Scaevola voluntarily thrust his hand into the altar-fire and stood mute and smiling, and watched it burn and char. If any man ever did that he had more self- control than I ever had. I could repress every indication of my agonies. I fainted so many times that I lost count.
He was the reverse of that type painted for us in Faulconbridge and Edmund of Gloster, whose coarse ambition for personal success is inflamed by a defiance of accidental disadvantages. To Daniel the words Father and Mother had the altar-fire in them; and the thought of all closest relations of our nature held still something of the mystic power which had made his neck and ears burn in boyhood.
Religious history presents many remarkable instances in which, through no mere phrase-worship, an unconscious literary tact has, for the sensitive, laid open a privileged pathway from one to another. "The altar-fire," people say, "has touched those lips!"
And he meant that he would show the world... He was honouring the world; he was paying the finest homage to it. In that head of his a flame burnt that was like an altar-fire, a miraculous and beautiful phenomenon, than which nothing is more miraculous nor more beautiful over the whole earth. Whence had it suddenly sprung, that flame?
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