Lord Ormont and His Aminta — Volume 1Meredith, George
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Lord Ormont and His Aminta — Volume 1
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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