The Living Age Volume 44 (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1855 Excerpt: ...in her queenly submission and womanliness, whom no one could humiliate, humble as she always is. There is no covering on Percy's head, where the wild locks begin to toss about in the wind as he quickens the pace of bis musings. This boy, who begins to be n man. is nineteen only, and has the world before him;--the world before him --and he spurns it with his young, triumphant foot, this subject-globe, made to be conquered. As he hurries to and fro upon this platform of his, the old warm family home behind, and the level conntrv spreading broad before, something mighty and great, called in the vocabulary of fancy, Fate. Fortune, and the World, lies under the dreamer's eyes. His pace quickens, and this mass of matted hair shakes out its lovelocks on the breeze. Ah, a very different thing from the evcrydays which will make life to Percy Vivian, as to all other mortal creatures, is the wild, bright prospect on which Percy Vivian looks abroad. Neither map nor description could convey to any other mind the faintest idea of this which appears to him. There arc no panoramas made of that celestial country;--tho view is too aerial and too dazzling for any landscape painter. Every one for himself, and not another, has a chance to look once into the charmed and glimmering vista; and Percy gazes, with bis brilliant eyes, into the heart of this enchantment now. Oh and alas for all those grand futures which may be; what halting, worn-out dcerepid things they come forth at the other end of this magnificent arch of fancy --poor, plethoric fortunes of money, instead of the glorious, generous, canonized Fortune of Hone; daily burdens, hard, and petty, and odious, instead of the noble martyrdoms and heroisms which were in our dreams; but as for Percy Vivian, to-day is only the ...