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"Sir," he said, turning to the executioner with his ordinary courtesy, "I pray you of your grace to grant me time for prayer, and strike not ere" touching his handkerchief "I shall let this fall." The executioner, a quiet, practical man, unpossessed by the fury of the mob, promised what was asked of him.
His torpid pulses throbbed again. The voice began again its whispering at his ear. "You cannot live without her. Accept her conditions. Better to be unhappy in the sight and sound and touch of her, unpossessed, than to be desperate, lacking her. Accept her conditions with a mental reservation. Trust to Time, the healer, to bring change and forgetfulness.
For whether seen smutted by the soot of the blacksmith shop, or whitened by the lime of the plasterer or bricklayer; whether bending beneath tool box of the carpenter or ensconced on the bench of the shoemaker, he has a moral strength, a consciousness of acquirement, giving him a dignity of manhood unpossessed by the menial and those engaged in unskilled labor.
You'd even be able to work in a cheap seat in a theater every now and then. He laughed and flushed as he thought of it. Miss Alicia had never had a doll's house. Rowcroft Vicarage did not run to dolls and their belongings. Her thwarted longing for a doll's house had a sort of parallel in her similarly thwarted longing for "a little boy." And here was her doll's house so long, so long unpossessed!
It never occurred to me that all this might have been done, and yet the soul of every hearer have remained in full alienation from God; and that, even could I have established in the bosom of one who stole such a principle of abhorrence at the meanness of dishonesty that he was prevailed upon to steal no more, he might still have retained a heart as completely unturned to God and as totally unpossessed by a principle of love to Him as before.
Doubtless mothers are far too ready to think THEIR sons above the ordinary breed of sons: self, unpossessed of God, will worship itself in its offspring; yet the sons whom HOLY mothers have regarded as born to great things and who have passed away without sign, may have gone on toward their great things.
How much then will you be to be blamed, if you do not embrace this opportunity of improvement and instruction? Beauty, though unseen, is not less excellent; and prudence, though unpossessed, is of value inestimable.
"I was then almost assured that the inheritance had neither profited the Borgias nor the family, but had remained unpossessed like the treasures of the Arabian Nights, which slept in the bosom of the earth under the eyes of the genie. I searched, ransacked, counted, calculated a thousand and a thousand times the income and expenditure of the family for three hundred years. It was useless.
But it has been supposed, with some reason, that those heroines of Scott's who show most touch of personal sympathy Catherine Seyton, Die Vernon, Lilias Redgauntlet bear features, physical or mental or both, of this Astarte, this 'Lost woman of his youth, yet unpossessed.
She had thought the grave was closed, the old wound healed by time and silence; and now a little child had torn it open, and it was bleeding and throbbing again with a pang such as she had never felt before, while there crept over her such a feeling of desolation and loneliness, a want of something unpossessed, as few have ever experienced.
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