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How suggestive this, of the ephemeral fame of even a great lawyer: "Swift as shadow, short as any dream Brief as the lightning in the collied night." Words long since uttered by an eminent jurist have not lost their significance: "There is, perhaps, no reputation that can be achieved amongst men that is so transitory, so evanescent, as that of a great advocate.
But if, as appeared the most likely thing, that father, tenderly as she had loved him, was gone from her forever, if life was but a flash across from birth to the grave, why should not those who loved make the best of it for each other during that one moment "brief as the lightning in the collied night"? They must try to be the more to one another, and the time was so short.
The vicar and his family had but just gathered round the breakfast-table, when, after having divested herself of her walking garments, she came in quietly and took her vacant place amongst them unnoticed and unquestioned. Swift as a shadow, short as any dream, Brief as the lightning in the collied night. And ere a man hath power to say, "Behold!"
On their return voyage they were caught in a terrible storm, from which they did not expect to be saved, and while the wild tumbling waves threatened momentarily to engulf them a couplet from his fragmentary Kasidah kept running in Burton's mind: "This collied night, these horrid waves, these gusts that sweep the whirling deep; What reck they of our evil plight, who on the shore securely sleep?"
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