Page:Whyte-Melville--Bones and I.djvu/279

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GUINEVERE.
271

humanity, at best "a little lower than the angels," is ever striving unsuccessfully to attain. There is courage, abiding by the award of its own conscience and appealing to a higher tribunal than the verdict of its kind; there is contempt for consequences; there is scrupulous, unswerving persistence in the path of duty, such as constitutes the soldier and the hero; there is large-hearted, far-seeing benevolence, that weighs its own crushed happiness and blighted life but as dust in the balance against the well-being of its fellows. Above all, there is that grand trust in a better world and an immortal identity, without which man, despite his strength of will and pride of intellect, were little superior to the beasts of the field. Such is the diapason, so to speak, of this mighty march of feeling—the march of an unconquered spirit and a kingly soul; while through it all, ever present, though ever