Bazalgette.
From two such natures as David and his wife nothing less noble should
spring; and therefore, through necessity, their daughter Julia, the
heroine of "Very Hard Cash," is that ideal of vehemence and sweetness
which we find her, not by any choice or fancy of the writer, but on
account of fate, natural deduction, and _a priori_ logic. She is,
however, for all that, to some extent a creation; one may imagine her,
long for her, look for her,--one will not immediately find her. Youth
never was painted so well as here; both Julia and Alfred are aureoled in
its beauty; they are not reasonable mortals with the accumulated
perfections of three-score and ten, but young creatures just brimmed, as
young creatures are, with the blissfulness of being. Nobody ever
appreciated youth as this writer does, nobody has so entered into it;
he never fails, to be sure, to make you laugh at it a little, but all
the time he confesses a kind of loving worship of that buoyant time when
the effervescence of the animal spirits fills the brain with its happy
fumes, of that fearless, confident period that
"Is not, like Atlas, curled
Stooping 'neath the gray old world,
But which takes it, lithe and bland,
Easily in its small hand.
Pages:
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48