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Nothing, least of all, futile self-torturing regret for faults committed, should cloud the fair morning dawning anew for him, which summoned him to active work, to gratitude and love. Uttering a sigh of relief, he paced the deck now brilliantly illuminated by silvery light with long strides. The moon above his head reminded him of Ledscha. He was no longer angry with her.
Nobler, perhaps, to die, and live as an heroic memory but then to leave Melisselda! To leave her warm breast and the sunlight and the green earth, and all that beauty of the world and of human life to which his eyes had only been unsealed after a lifetime of self-torturing blindness? "O God! O God!" he cried, "wherefore hast Thou mocked and abandoned me?"
There is nothing like the dead cold hand of the Past to take down our tumid egotism and lead us into the solemn flow of the life of our race. Rousseau came out of one of his sad self-torturing fits, as he cast his eye on the arches of the old Roman aqueduct, the Pont du Gard. I am far from denying that there is an attraction in a thriving railroad village.
The man who had been able to make himself agreeable and useful, while preserving his integrity, to characters so dissimilar as the refining, self-torturing, intellectual Duplessis-Mornay, the rude, aggressive, and straightforward Sully, the deep-revolving, restlessly plotting Bouillon, and the smooth, silent, and tortuous Villeroy men between whom there was no friendship, but, on the contrary, constant rancour had material in him to render valuable services at this particular epoch.
The man who had been able to make himself agreeable and useful, while preserving his integrity, to characters so dissimilar as the refining, self-torturing, intellectual Duplessis-Mornay, the rude, aggressive, and straightforward Sully, the deep-revolving, restlessly plotting Bouillon, and the smooth, silent, and tortuous Villeroy men between whom there was no friendship, but, on the contrary, constant rancour had material in him to render valuable services at this particular epoch.
Lord Byron had a soul near akin to Rousseau's, whose writings naturally made a deep impression on the poet's mind, and probably had an influence on his conduct and modes of thought: In some stanzas of 'Childe Harold' this sympathy is expressed with truth and power; especially is the weakness of the Swiss philosopher's character summed up in the following admirable lines: "Here the self-torturing sophist, wild Rousseau, The apostle of affliction, he who threw Enchantment over passion, and from woe Wrung overwhelming eloquence, first drew The breath which made him wretched; yet he knew How to make madness beautiful, and cast O'er erring deeds and thoughts a heavenly hue Of words, like sunbeams, dazzling as they passed The eyes, which o'er them shed tears feelingly and fast.
It would go in some sense maimed to the end. But the bitter self-torturing of that first endless year was over. Love, and her husband, and the thousand subtle forces of a changing world had conquered. She would live and die steadfast to the old faiths.
Because he was low and brutish and degraded, he never once suspected the truth, never saw in that beautiful young woman, anything of the double nature within her, of that curious, self-torturing, at times morbid sense of religion and of duty, at war with her own upright, innately heathy disposition.
She had felt it before a sort of blind, self-torturing obstinacy which would keep him to his vow though he bled for every letter. And yet she wrote again, patiently, sweetly, asking him to come to her. "I don't know what Hugh said to you no matter, forgive him. We were all at high tension last night. I know you didn't intend to hurt me, and I have put it all away.
Ah, dear brethren! that is a wearying, an endless, a self-torturing, an imprisoning, an enervating thought, and the plea of 'worthiness' is utterly out of place and unsustainable before God. II. Now let me turn to the deeper conviction which silences that plea.
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