Lord Ormont and His Aminta — CompleteMeredith, George
General
Lord Ormont and His Aminta — Complete
Meredith, George
English fiction -- 19th century
Weyburn still read the world as it came to him, by bite, marvelling at
this and that, after the fashion of most of us. He had not deserted his
adolescent's hero, or fallen upon analysis of a past season. But he was
now a young man, stoutly and cognizantly on the climb, with a good aim
overhead, axed green youth's enthusiasms a step below his heels: one
of the lovers of life, beautiful to behold, when we spy into them;
generally their aspect is an enlivenment, whatever may be the carving
of their features. For the sake of holy unity, this lover of life,
whose gaze was to the front in hungry animation, held fast to his young
dreams, perceiving a soul of meaning in them, though the fire might have
gone out; and he confessed to a past pursuit of delusions. Young men of
this kind will have, for the like reason, a similar rational sentiment
on behalf of our world's historic forward march, while admitting that
history has to be taken from far backward if we would gain assurance of
man's advance. It nerves an admonished ambition.
He was ushered into a London house's library, looking over a niggard
enclosure of gravel and dull grass, against a wall where ivy dribbled.
An armchair was beside the fireplace. To right and left of it a floreate
company of books in high cases paraded shoulder to shoulder, without
a gap; grenadiers on the line. Weyburn read the titles on their
scarlet-and-blue facings. They were approved English classics; honoured
veterans, who have emerged from the conflict with contemporary opinion,
stamped excellent, or have been pushed by the roar of contemporaneous
applauses to wear the leather-and-gilt uniform of our Immortals, until
a more qualmish posterity disgorges them. The books had costly bindings.
Lord Ormont's treatment of Literature appeared to resemble Lady
Charlotte's, in being reverential and uninquiring. The books she bought
to read were Memoirs of her time by dead men and women once known to
her. These did fatigue duty in cloth or undress. It was high drill with
all of Lord Ormont's books, and there was not a modern or a minor name
among the regiments. They smelt strongly of the bookseller's lump lots
by order; but if a show soldiery, they were not a sham, like a certain
row of venerably-titled backs, that Lady Charlotte, without scruple,
left standing to blow an ecclesiastical trumpet of empty contents; any
one might have his battle of brains with them, for the twining of an
absent key.
The door opened. Weyburn bowed to his old star in human shape: a grey
head on square shoulders, filling the doorway. He had seen at Olmer
Lady Charlotte's treasured miniature portrait of her brother; a perfect
likeness, she said--complaining the neat instant of injustice done to
the fire of his look.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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