into a creature of feeling and passion by the mysterious conditions of his existence, which oftenest arouses the poetic fervor in her.  The enthusiasm of high resolves, yearnings after the pure and beautiful, and love’s regenerating power, give to her themes which kindle poetic expression to a glow.  The vision of Mordecai on Blackfriars’ bridge affords a fine example of her love of the ideal in moral purpose, and shows how stimulating it is to her imagination.  It is a poetic picture of the finest quality she has given in this chapter, one that could easily have been made to find expression in verse of great beauty; but it is poetry in thought and spirit alone, not in form or structure.  It is true prose in form, strong in its fulness of detail, knit together with words of the right texture, built up into a true prose image of beauty in thought.

Mordecai’s mind wrought so constantly in images that his coherent trains of thought often resembled the significant dreams attributed to sleepers by waking persons in their most inventive moments; nay, they often resembled genuine dreams in their way of breaking off the passage from the known to the unknown.  Thus, for a long while, he habitually thought of the Being answering to his need as one distinctly approaching or turning his back toward him, darkly painted against a golden sky.  The reason of the golden sky lay in one of Mordecai’s habits.  He was keenly alive to some poetic aspects of London; and a favorite resort of his, when strength and leisure allowed, was to some one of the bridges, especially about sunrise or sunset.  Even when he was bending over watch-wheels and trinkets, or seated in a small upper room looking out on dingy bricks and dingy cracked windows, his imagination spontaneously planted him on some spot where he had a far-stretching scene; his thought went on in wide spaces, and whenever he could, he tried to have in reality the influences of a large sky.  Leaning on the parapet of Blackfriars’ bridge, and gazing meditatively, the breadth and calm of the river, with its long vista half hazy, half luminous, the grand dim masses or tall forms of buildings which were the signs of world-commerce, the on-coming of boats and barges from the still distance into sound and color, entered into his mood and blent themselves indistinguishably with his thinking, as a fine symphony to which we can hardly be said to listen, makes a medium that bears up our spiritual wings.  Thus it happened that the figure representative of Mordecai’s longing was mentally seen darkened by the excess of light in the aerial background.  But in the inevitable progress of his imagination toward fuller detail he ceased to see the figure with its back toward him.  It began to advance, and a face became discernible; the words youth, beauty, refinement, Jewish birth, noble gravity, turned into hardly individual but typical form and color:  gathered from his memory of faces seen among the Jews of Holland and Bohemia, and from the paintings