The conversation gradually assumed the tone best qualified for the display of his talents and acquisitions.

The gaiety of the evening was exalted in character, rather than checked, by the approaching dangers of the morrow.

All nerves were strung for the future, and prepared to enjoy the present.
This mood of mind is highly favourable for the exercise of the powers of imagination, for poetry, and for that eloquence which is allied to poetry.

Waverley, as we have elsewhere observed, possessed at times a wonderful flow of rhetoric; and, on the present occasion, he touched more than once the higher notes of feeling, and then again ran off in a wild voluntary of fanciful mirth.

He was supported and excited by kindred spirits, who felt the same impulse of mood and time; and even those of more cold and calculating habits were hurried along by the torrent.