David’s physique was of the kind that Nature gives to the fighter, the
man born to struggle in obscurity, or with the eyes of all men turned
upon him. The strong shoulders, rising above the broad chest, were in
keeping with the full development of his whole frame. With his thick
crop of black hair, his fleshy, high-colored, swarthy face, supported by
a thick neck, he looked at first sight like one of Boileau’s canons; but
on a second glance there was that in the lines about the thick lips,
in the dimple of the chin, in the turn of the square nostrils, with the
broad irregular line of central cleavage, and, above all, in the eyes,
with the steady light of an all-absorbing love that burned in them,
which revealed the real character of the man--the wisdom of the thinker,
the strenuous melancholy of a spirit that discerns the horizon on either
side, and sees clearly to the end of winding ways, turning the clear
light of analysis upon the joys of fruition, known as yet in idea alone,
and quick to turn from them in disgust. You might look for the flash of
genius from such a face; you could not miss the ashes of the volcano;
hopes extinguished beneath a profound sense of the social annihilation
to which lowly birth and lack of fortune condemns so many a loftier
mind. And by the side of the poor printer, who loathed a handicraft so
closely allied to intellectual work, close to this Silenus, joyless,
self-sustained, drinking deep draughts from the cup of knowledge and
of poetry that he might forget the cares of his narrow lot in the
intoxication of soul and brain, stood Lucien, graceful as some
sculptured Indian Bacchus.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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