he could rave with all the truth of life, that to have acted the idiot, more than the loss of the woman, was the ground of his anguish.  Each antecedent of his career had been a step of strength and success departed.  The woman was but a fragment of the tremendous wreck; the woman was utterly diminutive, yet she was the key of the reconstruction; the woman won, he would be himself once more:  and feeling that, his passion for her swelled to full tide and she became a towering splendour whereat his eyeballs ached, she became a melting armful that shook him to big bursts of tears.

The feeling of the return of strength was his love in force.  The giant in him loved her warmly.  Her sweetness, her archness, the opening of her lips, their way of holding closed, and her brightness of wit, her tender eyelashes, her appreciating looks, her sighing, the thousand varying shades of her motions and her features interflowing like a lighted water, swam to him one by one like so many handmaiden messengers distinctly beheld of the radiant indistinct whom he adored with more of spirit in his passion than before this tempest.  A giant going through a giant’s contortions, fleshly as the race of giants, and gross, coarse, dreadful, likely to be horrible when whipped and stirred to the dregs, Alvan was great-hearted:  he could love in his giant’s fashion, love and lay down life for the woman he loved, though the nature of the passion was not heavenly; or for the friend who would have to excuse him often; or for the public cause—­which was to minister to his appetites.  He was true man, a native of earth, and if he could not quit his huge personality to pipe spiritual music during a storm of trouble, being a soul wedged in the gnarled wood of the standing giant oak, and giving mighty sound of timber at strife rather than the angelical cry, he suffered, as he loved, to his depths.

We have not to plumb the depths; he was not heroic, but hugely man.  Love and man sometimes meet for noble concord; the strings of the hungry instrument are not all so rough that Love’s touch on them is indistinguishable from the rattling of the wheels within; certain herald harmonies have been heard.  But Love, which purifies and enlarges us, and sets free the soul, Love visiting a fleshly frame must have time and space, and some help of circumstance, to give the world assurance that the man is a temple fit for the rites.  Out of romances, he is not melodiously composed.  And in a giant are various giants to be slain, or thoroughly subdued, ere this divinity is taken for leader.  It is not done by miracle.