Either it seems to be a due reward for past action--that 'invita religio' which wells up in the blackest heart, or the sufferer gains a kind of onlook into sweet plains beyond, into which the troubled passage is taking him, and which can only thus be reached....
"Of animal suffering, unconscious tortures, it is harder to speak--of the innocent, for so they are, victims of lust and brutality in Babylon here, whose sense of suffering is almost gone, and is succeeded by nothing but the desire for rest; all this seems so meaningless, so futile....
"It is one of the problems I take up and let drop--take up and let drop a thousand times; but all sacrifice seems essentially good, and I do not throw the enigma aside in anger; I will wait for it to be explained to me.
"Ah, death, death, if we are enlightened enough by that time, what a storehouse of secrets, dear secrets you will have to tell us! I thrill all through, in moments like these, to think of it." "Of course," he said to me once, "there are times when we can only wait and hope; changing our posture, like a sick man, from time to time, to win a little ease; but when we reach a fresh standpoint, a fresh basis--which, thank God, one does from month to month--we are inclined to say with Albert Durer, 'It could not be better done.'" He was very fond of the doctrine of Special Providences.
"Every now and then I have--I suppose it is common--what may be called a run of luck in ordinary things; I get out of scrapes in a way I don't deserve; I find letters I have mislaid; annoyances are mysteriously shunted aside; money flows in; days of extraordinary happiness succeed one another; little events save vast complications of trouble, so that I long to turn round and grasp by the hand or kiss the cheek of the sweet friend who stands at my elbow, suggesting, ordering, providing day and night, smiling on me as I sleep, hovering around me as I work, without a word of praise.
Guardian angels! no fable.

God gives you a sudden and particular thought, and while you are independent of circumstances you master them as well." But such portraiture as the above is apt to get very vague and insipid unless one is able to convey a vivid picture of the man as he walked, and spoke, and lived.

The _sic sedebat_ in Trinity College (Cambridge) chapel has given more people a thrill at the thought of Bacon than ever gained one from his books.

Personality, personal characteristics, how one craves for them! To take a late instance, how far more impressive General Gordon's little cane is, which he twirled in his hand as he stormed redoubts and directed an action, than a thousand pages of rhetoric about his philosophy or his views of life.
He was now, as ever, for strangers meeting him for the first time, an impressive but rather disappointing man.

He had shaved his beard, keeping only his usual moustache; his face was very spare, with a pallor that was not unhealthy.