For
such as he are weak as well as strong; weak in the absence of the
innumerable little sympathies and worldlinesses which make life
delightful, and but too apt to despise and tread upon those gentle
flowers which are as really here as the sun and the stars, and are
nearer to us. Zachariah found in the Corsair exactly what answered
to his own inmost self, down to its very depths. The lofty style,
the scorn of what is mean and base, the courage--root of all virtue--
that dares and evermore dares in the very last extremity, the love of
the illimitable, of freedom, and the cadences like the fall of waves
on a sea-shore were attractive to him beyond measure. More than
this, there was Love. His own love was a failure, and yet it was
impossible for him to indulge for a moment his imagination elsewhere.
The difference between him and his wife might have risen to absolute
aversion, and yet no wandering fancy would ever have been encouraged
towards any woman living. But when he came to Medora's song:
"Deep in my soul that tender secret dwells,
Lonely and lost to light for evermore,
Save when to thine my heart responsive swells,
Then trembles into silence as before.
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