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He was a romantic some would have said a sentimental person, with a poet always in his pocket, and a hunger for all that might shield him from the worst uglinesses of life, and the worst despairs of thought; an optimist, and, in his own sense, Christian.
Yes, he was an optimist and a dreamer! one who had, indeed, never grappled in his own person with the worst poisons and corrosions of the soul. Yet still, as he passed along the London streets marked here and there by the newspaper placards which announced Ashe's committee triumphs of the night before he was haunted anew by the immortal words: "One thing thou lackest," ... and "Come, follow me!"
We have other faults; the serenest optimist would never deny them; but, faults or no faults, we crown civilization to-day. The richest man in America has not the least idea what it means to live like a gentleman in our sense. And there is no flaw in my appreciation of your country.
Morris is no optimist either in regard to French character or the progress of public affairs," said Lafayette, bitingly. "But I can assure him that if the French are inconstant, ignorant, and immoral, they are also energetic, lively, and easily aroused by noble examples.
He lay back in his chair with a broad smile, the picture of an optimist in his element. One by one the wanderers ascended the bank and sat in their strange seats. As each of them sat down a roar of enthusiasm rose from the carnival, such as that with which crowds receive kings. Cups were clashed and torches shaken, and feathered hats flung in the air.
The student who is thoroughly broken to the study of literary history is never a pessimist, though he may be very rarely an optimist: for the one thing of which he should be thoroughly convinced is its incalculableness.
The narrowness serves to concentrate the strength and accelerate the work. The reformer may be bigoted and unreasonable, but he must be an optimist whilst pursuing his object. He must believe in life and in the inherent goodness of the earth. He must be a stranger to the dyspeptic melancholy through which Carlyle saw the world as a "noisy inanity" and life as an incomprehensible monstrosity.
But Ashe was still haunted by it, though quite ready being a natural optimist to escape from it, and all other incurable anxieties, as soon as Kitty herself should give the signal. As to the moral difficulties and worries of those months at Haggart, Ashe remembered them as little as might be. Kitty's illness, indeed, had shown itself in more directions than one, as an amending and appeasing fact.
A blithering, water-eyed optimist to the end, he'd die with a prayer of thankfulness and gratitude. Thus innocuously abstract, moving in the doldrum which sometimes surrounded him after his day's work, he turned into the boulevard along the lake. The day grew abruptly fresher here. An arc of blue sky rising from the east flung a great curve over the building tops.
Thus there was George Macdonald, a Scot of genius as genuine as Carlyle's; he could write fairy-tales that made all experience a fairy-tale. He could give the real sense that every one had the end of an elfin thread that must at last lead them into Paradise. It was a sort of optimist Calvinism. But such really significant fairy-tales were accidents of genius.
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