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The unseen Lord and his reported words were to Gibbie realities, compared with which the very visible Mr. Sclater and his assured utterance were as the merest seemings of a phantom mood.
She was gnawed by that false fever which riots in those who seek by outward seemings and distinctions to console themselves for the want of their own self-esteem, or who, despising the world with which they are brought in contact, sigh for those worldly advantages which alone justify to the world itself their contempt.
The air, perfumed with incense-odours, seemed weighted with the memory of prayers and devotional silences, -and in the midst of it all, surrounded by the defaced and crumbling emblems of life and death, and the equally decaying symbols of immortality, with the splendours of the sinking sun shedding roseate haloes about him, walked one for whom eternal truths outweighed all temporal seemings, Cardinal Felix Bonpre, known favourably, and sometimes alluded to jestingly at the Vatican, as "Our good Saint Felix."
Who shall explain and disentangle those high and restless and interwoven emotions with which intellectual ambition, honourable and ardent, gazes upon that solemn thing with which, in which, for which it lives and labours, the Human Multitude? To that abstracted, solitary man, the illumination, the festivity, the curiosity, the holiday, were nothing, or but as fleeting phantoms and vain seemings.
Even in that moment she did not forget that she knew her own mother, for she took the precaution to elicit a confirmatory letter from her mother's attorney, under guise of thanking him for the friendly interest he had "ever manifested" in the welfare of the Lansdales. It occurred to me that Little Miss had been endowed, either by nature or experience, with a marked distrust of mere seemings.
The comb that had confined her tresses lay at her feet, and the high dress which concealed her swelling breast had been loosened, to give vent to the suffocating and indignant throbbings which had rebelled against its cincture; all appeared to announce that bitterness of grief when the mind, as it were, wreaks its scorn upon the body in its contempt for external seemings, and to proclaim that the present more subdued and softened sorrow had only succeeded to a burst far less quiet and uncontrolled.
Now, Sir Miles's habitual associates were persons of the world, well- bred and decorous, indeed, before children, as the best of the old school were, avoiding all anecdotes; all allusions, for which the prudent matron would send her girls out of the room; but with that reserve speaking of the world as the world goes: if talking of young A , calculating carelessly what he would have when old A , his father, died; naturally giving to wealth and station and ability their fixed importance in life; not over-apt to single out for eulogium some quiet goodness; rather inclined to speak with irony of pretensions to virtue; rarely speaking but with respect of the worldly seemings which rule mankind.
The comb that had confined her tresses lay at her feet, and the high dress which concealed her swelling breast had been loosened, to give vent to the suffocating and indignant throbbings which had rebelled against its cincture; all appeared to announce that bitterness of grief when the mind, as it were, wreaks its scorn upon the body in its contempt for external seemings, and to proclaim that the present more subdued and softened sorrow had only succeeded to a burst far less quiet and uncontrolled.
Therefore, betimes, the whole frame of society was changed to her eye, from the calm aspect it wears to those who live united with their kind; she viewed all seemings with suspicion; and before she had entered the world, prepared to live in it as a conspirator in a city convulsed, spying and espied, schemed against and scheming, here the crown for the crafty, there the axe for the outwitted.
Doubtless the sights and the sounds which had haunted the last gloomy night, the calm reason of Faber would strip of their magical seemings; the Eyes in the space and the Foot in the circle might be those of no terrible Demons, but of the wild's savage children whom I had seen, halting, curious and mute, in the light of the morning.
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