Knowles, passing through the restless crowds, read with keen eye among them strange meanings by this common light of the sun,--meanings such as you and I might read, if our eyes were clear as his,--or morbid, it may be, you think?
A commonplace crowd like this in the street without: women with cold, fastidious faces, heavy-brained, bilious men, dapper 'prentices, draymen, prize-fighters, negroes.

Knowles looked about him as into a seething caldron, in which the people I tell you of were atoms, where the blood of uncounted races was fused, but not mingled,--where creeds, philosophies, centuries old, grappled hand to hand in their death-struggle,--where innumerable aims and beliefs and powers of intellect, smothered rights and triumphant wrongs, warred together, struggling for victory.
Vulgar American life?
He thought it a life more potent, more tragic in its history and prophecy, than any that has gone before.

People called him a fanatic.

It may be that he was one: yet the uncouth old man, sick in soul from some pain that I dare not tell you of; in his own life, looked into the depths of human loss with a mad desire to set it right.

On the very faces of those who sneered at him he found some trace of failure, something that his heart carried up to God with a loud and exceeding bitter cry.