Those aspects of her face which had answered to the purest moments of his rapturous youth were as present as if she had been his daily companion.

He needed no picture to recall her countenance; often he had longed for the skill of an artist, that he might portray that grave sweetness, that impassioned faith, to be his soul's altar-piece.

Lost, lost! and, with her, lost the uncompromising zeal of his earliest manhood.

Only too consciously he had descended to a lower level; politics tempted him because they offered a field in which he could exercise his most questionable faculty, and earn with it a speedy return of the praise to which he was so susceptible.

It marks his position to state that, when politics began seriously to hold his thoughts, he was with difficulty able to decide to which party he should attach himself.