We assume a load with confident readiness, and up to a certain point the growing irksomeness of pressure is tolerable; but at last the desire for relief can no longer be resisted. Tito had an innate love of reticence-let us say a talent for it—which acted as other impulses do, without any conscious motive, and, like all people to whom concealment is easy, he would now and then conceal something which had as little the nature of a secret as the fact that he had seen a flight of crows. -0 The Florentine youth had had very evil habits and foul tongues: it seemed at first an unmixed blessing when they were got to shout Viva Gesù!' But Savonarola was forced at last to say from the pulpit, 'There is a little too much shouting of " Viva Gesù!" This constant utterance of sacred words brings them into contempt. Let me have no more of that shouting till the next Festa.' -0 When was the fatal coquetry inherent in superfluous authorship ever quite contented with the ready praise of friends? Strong feeling unsatisfied is never without its superstition, either of hope or despair. Fruit is seed. The light can be a curtain as well as the darkness. -0 Perfect scheming demands omniscience. Tito felt for the first time, without defining it to himself, that loving awe in the presence of noble womanhood, which is perhaps something like the worship paid of old to a great nature-goddess, who was not allknowing, but whose life and power were something deeper and more primordial than knowledge Perhaps of all sombre paths that on which we go back, after treading it with a strong resolution, is the one that most severely tests the fervour of renunciation. -0 Life is so complicated a game that the devices of skill are liable to be defeated at every turn by airblown chances, incalculable as the descent of thistledown. Our lives make a moral tradition for our individual selves, as the life of mankind at large makes a moral tradition for the race; and to have once acted greatly seems a reason why we should always be noble. But Tito was feeling the effect of an opposite tradition: he had won no memories of self-conquest and perfect faithfulness from which he could have a sense of falling. It is not force of intellect which causes ready repulsion from the aberration and eccentricities of greatness, any more than it is force of vision that causes the eye to explore the warts on a face bright with human expression; it is simply the negation of high sensibilities. -0 There is no kind of conscious obedience that is not an advance on lawlessness. A widow at fifty-five whose satisfaction has been largely drawn from what she thinks of her own person, and what she believes others think of it, requires a great fund of imagination to keep her spirits buoyant. The light is perhaps never felt more strongly as a divine presence stirring all those inarticulate sensibilities which are our deepest life, than in those moments when it instantaneously awakens the shadows. -0 In the career of a great public orator who yields himself to the inspiration of the moment, that conflict of selfish and unselfish emotion which in most men is hidden in the chamber of the soul, is brought into terrible evidence; the language of the inner voices is written out in letters of fire. To one who is anxiously in search of a certain object the faintest suggestions have a peculiar significance. Romola felt that intensity of life which seems to transcend both grief and joy-in which the mind seems to itself akin to elder forces that wrought out existence before the birth of pleasure and pain. 0 This was the tangled web that Romola had in her mind as she sat weary in the darkness. No radiant angel came across the gloom with a clear message for her. In those times, as now, there were human beings who never saw angels or heard perfectly clear messages. Such truth as came to them was brought confusedly in the voices and deeds of men not at all like the seraphs of unfailing wing and piercing vision-men who believed falsities as well as truths, and did the wrong as well as the right. The helping hands stretched out to them were the hands of men who stumbled and often saw dimly, so that these beings unvisited by angels had no other choice than to grasp that stumbling guidance along the path of reliance and action which is the path of life, or else to pause in loneliness and disbelief, which is no path, but the arrest of inaction and death. There was nothing transcendent in Savonarola's face. It was not beautiful. It was strong-featured, and owed all its refinement to habits of mind and rigid discipline of the body. The source of the impression his glance produced on Romola was the sense it conveyed to her of interest in her and care for her apart from any personal feeling. It was the first time she had encountered a gaze in which simple human fellowship expressed itself as a strongly-felt bond. Such a glance is half the vocation of the priest or spiritual guide of men. -0 There are men whose presence infuses trust and reverence; there are others to whom we have need to carry our trust and reverence ready made. ・0 The inspiring consciousness breathed into Romola by Savonarola's influence that her lot was vitally united with the general lot had exalted even the minor details of obligation into religion. She was marching with a great army; she was feeling the stress of a common life. If victims were needed, and it was uncertain on whom the lot might fall, she would stand ready to answer to her name. She had stood long; she had striven hard to fulfil the bond, but she had seen all the conditions which made the fulfilment possible gradually forsaking her. The one effect of her marriage-tie seemed to be the stifling predominance over her of a nature that she despised. All her efforts at union had only made its impossibility more palpable, and the relation had become for her simply a degrading servitude. The law was sacred. Yes, but rebellion might be sacred too. It flashed upon her mind that the problem before her was essentially the same as that which had lain before Savonarola-the problem where the sacredness of obedience ended, and where the sacredness of rebellion began. To her, as to him, there had come one of those moments in life when the soul must dare to act on its own warrant, not only without external law to appeal to, but in the face of a |