University of Virginia Library

8. CHAPTER VIII.

We said that the remembrance of Norman's past
agony, and even of his love, only swept over him
now with a softened power. The former sounded
to him like the roar of a far-off city, and his dream
of Flora Temple came floating faintly as the swell
of distant music on the breeze, sometimes with a
tone more audible, and sometimes dying almost entirely
away. His character was changed. He had
awakened from the confidence, the security, the
thoughtlessness of youth. He had been torn rudely
adrift from all that graced life, and he had learned
to commune with himself. Travel, solitary, observing
travel, amid all that was wonderful on the globe,
had poured into his mind new materials for study
and thought. Sometimes he imagined that his original

and boyish character had been all worn away,
and replaced by new opinions and impressions, new
modes of acting and thinking, new memories, new
hopes and ambitions. America, to his lively and
poetic imagination, was but the stage of a theatre,
on which, in times gone by, he had acted a tragic
part. Never, he thought, could those scenes be
revisited. He strove to fancy it all a dream; rescuing
nothing from the phantoms but two or three
linked most closely to his bosom by ties of relationship
and love. His father, and sister, and Howard
were among those whom he hoped once more to
behold; but he was to behold them in Europe.

It may be supposed that among his present feelings
was a distaste for general society. He had
changed his name, not with any intention to deny
his identity among those with whom he might
chance to associate, but for reasons hitherto mentioned.
Society exposed him not only to painful
and impertinent curiosity, but to awkward and embarrassing
predicaments. He met them, however,
when inevitable, with firm moral courage and dignity;
but while he never shrank from notice, he
never courted it. His person and bearing, his now
fully developed genius and matured and enriched
understanding, would have secured him an honourable
reception in any circle, even under his own
name, and with the full knowledge of his story.
Indeed, when connected with his appearance,
around which years, and travel, and melancholy,
and study, had shed a more striking grace and continual
self-possession, there was in his adventures
something romantic and thrilling. So young, so
noble, so handsome—with such eyes and such a
voice,—women pronounced him innocent the moment
they saw him. His letters of introduction
always alluded to his history; he wished no concealment

from his friends: but they were also
strong, and even enthusiastic, in expressions of esteem,
confidence, and admiration. Many a pressing
allurement had been laid to seduce the unfortunate
and handsome young stranger into the circles
of the gay and the lovely. But other aspirations
had awakened within him.

As soon as he had abandoned the definite hope
of discovering any thing respecting Miss Romain—
a hope which, however faded, lay yet, perhaps half
unknown to himself, smouldering like hidden fire in
his heart—he had thought to beguile his solitude
and disappointment in study. Driven over the battlements
of the world of external beauty, he explored
a new and mightier world in books. In his
character lay a deep appreciation of the grandeur
and triumph, of the almost celestial grace and dignity,
which rewards the searcher after knowledge.
Wealth he had without limit. Love?—he had
tasted the enchanted goblet, and its contents turned
to tears as he drained. Ambition? ambition for the
world?—power, influence, applause among men?
—he shuddered; for he remembered, with a writhing
and transpierced heart, that fatal night when,
amid the crash of thunder, and the riot and whirl
of a maddened conflagration, his fellow-beings had
raised against him the yell of the bloodhound; and
“Leslie the murderer!”—a peal befitting the dun
valuts of hell itself—drove him from his love and
from his country. No; his path lay no more among
men. He was to carve it out through the sublime
and lonely altitudes of science. For himself—or,
peradventure (and a solemn thrill of inconceivable
rapture rolled through his vems at the thought), for
the eyes of a race yet unborn—he would kindle
about his brow the steady halo of the scholar.
Here was a world of which he might be the monarch.

A world whose numberless and illumined paths he
could mount alone; a world peopled but with the
awful spirits of the great of old; and all conjured
up obedient around him by the wave of his silent
wand, and in the solitude of his midnight hours.

Reader, can you not feel and triumph with the
outcast and the exile—with the homeless and the
hopeless—when the lofty and splendid aisles of this
holier sphere burst and broadened upon his gaze.
A new gift of wings seemed to unfold themselves at
his shoulder; and spirit voices, inaudible to the
grosser sense of others, spoke sweetly in his ears,
and the scales of mortality fell from his orbs, and
the divinity of the past and the present was upon
him and within him. Roaming over the magnificent
and wonderful globe, he read its lessons and
penetrated its secrets. Oh! what are the glitter of
wealth and the pride of royalty, the pomp of troops
and the allurements of sensual luxury, to the plain
garb and unattended simplicity of the scholar?
Visiting no spot but its history is familiar; reading
a thousand sweet secrets and eloquent lessons in
every simple flower, in every thronged city, in every
lonely wood; gorgeous visions and stately phantoms
rising up before him upon every plain, by every
ruin! Is he not a monarch? Does he not dwell
in his own solemn kingdom? Are not the air and
the earth, the desert sea and the gold-paved sky,
more to him than to other men?

Norman had been educated only as young men
of his age and country are but too often educated.
The classical studies are got through with at college,
and afterward neglected. Business, fashion,
pleasure, then tempt the steps and monopolize the
swift rolling year. New actors are to be seen, new
excursions to be enjoyed. Books soon become
strangers, except the ephemeral works of the day,

where all that is noble and grand is too often made
subservient to amusement. Such a giddy as well
as heartless thing is the coterie of fashion. Perhaps
but for the peal of thunder which had fallen
on his path—thus fallen from a heaven of unstained
blue—he never could have exerted, never known
the divinity within him. Thus often, in this shadowy
world, the most terrible calamity is but the
sable mantle of some luminous blessing.

Books soon became to him, not only a refuge, but
a passion. With a matured and firmer understanding,
he now retraced his way through those temples
of classic lore where his boyish foot had lingered
but half conscious of their splendour; and oh, what
associations often swept over him, while wandering
again back over those paths of his by-gone days!
Often he stood once more in the sunny haunts of
early life, and the voices of his childhood rose
around him; and hope—then a dear and familiar
spirit, now the spectre of one buried—seemed again
to smile and cheer him on. The modern languages
he mastered with a rapidity that surprised himself;
and every author in the French, the Italian, and the
German, he could read with fluency and delight.
With hushed and solemn joy, too, as one in the solitude
of night, he stood to gaze on those great and
ever steady stars in the literary firmament, which
have burnt there just so gloriously upon the eyes
of vanished ages. Then he learned how far exclusive
devotion could carry the mind.

The thirst for knowledge, unslaked, unslakable,
grew upon him. History opened its immense and
sublime realms, to which the narrow present became
only a point almost invisible. In this startling
study he forgot himself for months—for years.
Here met the lonely student his silent and unaccusing
companions. Here found he a home where

his footsteps could wander in peace. Alexander
and Pericles, Camillus and Cæsar, Alaric and Mahomet—he
walked with these. The Grecian temple
rose before him against the blue serene. The
streets of old Rome and her mighty millions spread
around. Thebes, Palmyra, and Jerusalem were
the haunts of his spirit.

But history involved other studies of a yet more
astounding nature—astronomy, geology, metaphysics,
the human mind, the world of inferior living
creatures; and amid them all stood, chaste, stately,
brilliant, and eternal—towering, yet unequalled, yet
unharmed, through every age, every clime, every
language—those gorgeous monuments which the
poet has reared, those proud battlements of intellect
and genius, defying decay, even as the cloud-cleaving
and ice-capped Alps dazzle with their silver
tops each rolling generation. Now, for the first
time, he began to comprehend the immensity, the
solemnity of existence—this inexplicable gift, this
ray of immortal divinity, lighting up a handful of
mortal dust. We have said his character was
changed. He had left the circle of fashion. He
had burst from the entanglements of youthful hopes
and habits—of selfish pleasures and idle frivolities,
in which so many, capable of nobler enjoyments,
fritter away their years. He was no longer the
sighing boy, nor the musing youth. Manhood had
come upon him, and with manhood, reflection.

At this period accident enabled him to render a
very important service to the Marquis Torrini, an
old and wealthy nobleman of the Tuscan court.
Meetings between them took place necessarily and
frequently. To this gentleman Norman had been
presented with a letter of introduction, from one of
his most intimate friends in Vienna. But hearing of
him a character that attracted neither esteem nor

sympathy, he had never commenced the acquaintance.
Having it now thrust upon him, he handed
the letter. It touched upon his history. He hoped
that it would frighten his new friend, whose absorbing
weakness, or passion, was superstition.
But, on the contrary, from some inexplicable caprice,
the feeble dotard, who had regarded most
young men with dislike, became enamoured—declared
he knew all the story—that it only rendered
Signore Montfort a greater favourite—that he must
not think of refusing a suite of rooms in his palace,
one of the most remarkably splendid, by-the-way,
in all Florence. Leslie did think of refusing, and
very seriously; but among the attractions of the
Torrini palace were a spacious and valuable library,
and a gallery of rare old paintings. From severe
studies he had lately turned to paintings for recreation,
and delighted to acquaint himself, not only
with the gems of art and the difference between the
schools, but to trace out the singular fortunes of the
immortal and inspired artists. He accepted the invitation.

It was about the middle of December when he
entered the palace. He found the old lord much
better than he had been represented, although utterly
abandoned to the magnificent dreams of the
Catholic persuasion, which walks familiarly with
saints and angels, and sees God's finger writing on
the earth and sky. Perhaps the nature and tender
affection of a father softened the harsher features
of his real character. You cannot hate a man who
is reverenced and beloved by a guileless and beautiful
young daughter—at least I cannot.