altered earth to animate its efforts, to smile upon its success, then
the last spark quivered and died; and--and--but forgive me--on this
subject I am not often wont to wander. I would say that ambition is
for me no more; not so are its effects: but the hope of serving that
race whom I have loved as brothers, but who have never known me,--who,
by the exterior" (and here something bitter mingled with his voice),
"pass sentence upon the heart; in whose eyes I am only the cold, the
wayward, the haughty, the morose,--the hope of serving them is to me,
now, a far stronger passion than ambition was heretofore; and whatever
for that end the love of fame would have dictated, the love of mankind
will teach me still more ardently to perform."

They were now upon the bridge. Pausing, they leaned over, and looked
along the scene before them. Dark and hushed, the river flowed
sullenly on, save where the reflected stars made a tremulous and
broken beam on the black surface of the water, or the lights of the
vast City, which lay in shadow on its banks, scattered at capricious
intervals a pale but unpiercing wanness rather than lustre along the
tide, or save where the stillness was occasionally broken by the faint
oar of the boatman or the call of his rude voice, mellowed almost into
music by distance and the element.

But behind them, as they leaned, the feet of passengers on the great
thoroughfare passed not oft,--but quick; and that sound, the commonest
of earth's, made rarer and rarer by the advancing night, contrasted
rather than destroyed the quiet of the heaven and the solemnity of the
silent stars.

"It is an old but a just comparison," said Mordaunt's companion,
"which has likened life to a river such as we now survey, gliding