 melancholy, it is no feeble passivity, but enters into the
foreshadowed capability of heroism.
    Some observant persons may perhaps remember his emaciated figure, and dark
eyes deep in their sockets, as he stood in front of a picture that had touched
him either to new or habitual meditation: he commonly wore a cloth cap with
black fur round it, which no painter would have asked him to take off. But
spectators would be likely to think of him as an odd-looking Jew, who probably
got money out of pictures; and Mordecai, when he noticed them, was perfectly
aware of the impression he made. Experience had rendered him morbidly alive to
the effect of a man's poverty and other physical disadvantages in cheapening his
ideas, unless they are those of a Peter the Hermit who has a tocsin for the
rabble. But he was too sane and generous to attribute his spiritual banishment
solely to the excusable prejudices of others: certain incapacities of his own
had made the sentence of exclusion; and hence it was that his imagination had
constructed another man who would be something more ample than the second soul
bestowed, according to the notion of the Cabbalists, to help out the
insufficient first - who would be a blooming human life, ready to incorporate
all that was worthiest in an existence whose visible, palpable part was burning
itself fast away. His inward need for the conception of this expanded, prolonged
self was reflected as an outward necessity. The thoughts of his heart (that
ancient phrase best shadows the truth) seemed to him too precious, too closely
inwoven with the growth of things not to have a further destiny. And as the more
beautiful, the stronger, the more executive self took shape in his mind, he
loved it beforehand with an affection half identifying, half contemplative and
grateful.
    Mordecai's mind wrought so constantly in images, that his coherent trains of
thought often resembled the significant dreams attributed to sleepers by waking
persons in their most inventive moments; nay, they often resembled genuine
dreams in their way of breaking off the passage from the known to the unknown.
Thus, for a long while, he habitually thought of the Being answering to his need
as one distantly approaching or turning his back towards him, darkly painted
against a golden sky. The reason of the golden sky lay in one of Mordecai's
habits. He was keenly alive to some poetic aspects of London; and a favourite
resort of his, when strength and leisure allowed, was to some one of the
bridges, especially about sunrise or sunset. Even when he was bending over
watch-wheels and trinkets
