have brought himself to say to him—­“There is loveliness yet left, and within thy reach:  take the good, etc.; forget the nothing that has been, in the something that may yet for awhile avoid being nothing too; comfort thy heart with a fresh love:  the time will come to forget both, in the everlasting tomb of the ancient darkness”?  Few men would consent to be comforted in accordance with their professed theories of life; and more than most would Faber, at this period of his suffering, have scorned such truth for comfort.  As it was, men gave him a squeeze of the hand, and women a tearful look; but from their sympathy he derived no faintest pleasure, for he knew he deserved nothing that came from heart of tenderness.  Not that he had begun to condemn himself for his hardness to the woman who, whatever her fault, yet honored him by confessing it, or to bemoan her hard fate to whom a man had not been a hiding-place from the wind, a covert from the tempest of life, a shadow-shelter from the scorching of her own sin.  As he recovered from the double shock, and, his strength slowly returning, his work increased, bringing him again into the run of common life, his sense of desolation increased.  As his head ached less, his heart ached the more, nor did the help he ministered to his fellows any longer return in comfort to himself.  Hitherto his regard of annihilation had been as of something so distant, that its approach was relatively by degrees infinitesimal, but as the days went on, he began to derive a gray consolation from the thought that he must at length cease to exist.  He would not hasten the end; he would be brave, and see the play out.  Only it was all so dull!  If a woman looked kindly at him, if for a moment it gave him pleasure, the next it was as an arrow in his heart.  What a white splendor was vanished from his life!  Where were those great liquid orbs of radiating darkness?—­where was that smile with its flash of whiteness?—­that form so lithe, yet so stately, so perfect in modulation?—­where were those hands and feet that spoke without words, and took their own way with his heart?—­those arms—?  His being shook to its center.  One word of tenderness and forgiveness, and all would have been his own still!—­But on what terms?—­Of dishonor and falsehood, he said, and grew hard again.  He was sorry for Juliet, but she and not he was to blame.  She had ruined his life, as well as lost her own, and his was the harder case, for he had to live on, and she had taken with her all the good the earth had for him.  She had been the sole object of his worship; he had acknowledged no other divinity; she was the loveliness of all things; but she had dropped from her pedestal, and gone down in the sea that flows waveless and windless and silent around the worlds.  Alas for life!  But he would bear on till its winter came.  The years would be as tedious as hell; but nothing that ends can be other than brief.  Not willingly even yet would he fail of what work was his.  The world was bad enough; he would not leave it worse than he had found it.  He would work life out, that he might die in peace.  Fame truly there was none for him, but his work would not be lost.  The wretched race of men would suffer a little the less that he had lived.  Poor comfort, if more of health but ministered to the potency of such anguish as now burrowed in him like a mole of fire!