When he quitted her, at the moment of her departure for England, it was simply a question whether he would abandon the Mediterranean, and the prospect of a great future there opening before him, or sever a few weeks earlier a companionship which must in any event end upon her arrival home.
There is yet another point of view from which his command of the "Agamemnon" is seen to hold a peculiar relation to Nelson's story.
This was the period in which expectation passed into fulfilment, when development, long arrested by unpropitious circumstances, resumed its outward progress under the benign influence of a favoring environment, and the bud, whose rare promise had long been noted by a few discerning eyes, unfolded into the brilliant flower, destined in the magnificence of its maturity to draw the attention of a world.

To the fulness of his glorious course these three years were what the days of early manhood are to ripened age; and they are marked by the same elasticity, hopefulness, and sanguine looking to the future that characterize youth, before illusions vanish and even success is found to disappoint.

Happiness was his then, as at no other time before or after; for the surrounding conditions of enterprise, of difficulties to be overcome, and dangers to be met, were in complete correspondence with those native powers that had so long struggled painfully for room to exert themselves.

His health revived, and his very being seemed to expand in this congenial atmosphere, which to him was as life from the dead.

As with untiring steps he sped onward and upward,--counting naught done while aught remained to do, forgetting what was behind as he pressed on to what was before,--the ardor of pursuit, the delight of achievement, the joy of the giant running his course, sustained in him that glow of animation, that gladness in the mere fact of existence, physical or moral, in which, if anywhere, this earth's content is found.