visage widened upward from the chin, though not very markedly before it reached the broad-lying brows.  The temples were strongly indented by the swelling of the forehead above them:  and on both sides of the head there ran a pregnant ridge, such as will sometimes lift men a deplorable half inch above the earth we tread.  If this man was a problem to others, he was none to himself; and when others called him an idealist, he accepted the title, reading himself, notwithstanding, as one who was less flighty than many philosophers and professedly practical teachers of his generation.  He saw far, and he grasped ends beyond obstacles:  he was nourished by sovereign principles; he despised material present interests; and, as I have said, he was less supple than a soldier.  If the title of idealist belonged to him, we will not immediately decide that it was opprobrious.  The idealized conception of stern truths played about his head certainly for those who knew and who loved it.  Such a man, perceiving a devout end to be reached, might prove less scrupulous in his course, possibly, and less remorseful, than revolutionary Generals.  His smile was quite unclouded, and came softly as a curve in water.  It seemed to flow with, and to pass in and out of, his thoughts, to be a part of his emotion and his meaning when it shone transiently full.  For as he had an orbed mind, so had he an orbed nature.  The passions were absolutely in harmony with the intelligence.  He had the English manner; a remarkable simplicity contrasting with the demonstrative outcries and gesticulations of his friends when they joined him on the height.  Calling them each by name, he received their caresses and took their hands; after which he touched the old man’s shoulder.

“Agostino, this has breathed you?”

“It has; it has, my dear and best one!” Agostino replied.  “But here is a good market-place for air.  Down below we have to scramble for it in the mire.  The spies are stifling down below.  I don’t know my own shadow.  I begin to think that I am important.  Footing up a mountain corrects the notion somewhat.  Yonder, I believe, I see the Grisons, where Freedom sits.  And there’s the Monte della Disgrazia.  Carlo Alberto should be on the top of it, but he is invisible.  I do not see that Unfortunate.”

“No,” said Carlo Ammiani, who chimed to his humour more readily than the rest, and affected to inspect the Grisons’ peak through a diminutive opera-glass.  “No, he is not there.”

“Perhaps, my son, he is like a squirrel, and is careful to run up t’other side of the stem.  For he is on that mountain; no doubt of it can exist even in the Boeotian mind of one of his subjects; myself, for example.  It will be an effulgent fact when he gains the summit.”