 was otherwise with the effect of their meeting on Mordecai. For many
winters, while he had been conscious of an ebbing physical life, and a widening
spiritual loneliness, all his passionate desire had concentred itself in the
yearning for some young ear into which he could pour his mind as a testament,
some soul kindred enough to accept the spiritual product of his own brief,
painful life, as a mission to be executed. It was remarkable that the
hopefulness which is often the beneficent illusion of consumptive patients, was
in Mordecai wholly diverted from the prospect of bodily recovery and carried
into the current of this yearning for transmission. The yearning, which had
panted upward from out of overwhelming discouragements, had grown into a hope -
the hope into a confident belief, which, instead of being checked by the clear
conception he had of his hastening decline, took rather the intensity of
expectant faith in a prophecy which has only brief space to get fulfilled in.
    Some years had now gone since he had first begun to measure men with a keen
glance, searching for a possibility which became more and more a distinct
conception. Such distinctness as it had at first was reached chiefly by a method
of contrast: he wanted to find a man who differed from himself. Tracing reasons
in that self for the rebuffs he had met with and the hindrances that beset him,
he imagined a man who would have all the elements necessary for sympathy with
him, but in an embodiment unlike his own: he must be a Jew, intellectually
cultured, morally fervid - in all this a nature ready to be plenished from
Mordecai's; but his face and frame must be beautiful and strong, he must have
been used to all the refinements of social life, his voice must flow with a full
and easy current, his circumstances be free from sordid need: he must glorify
the possibilities of the Jew, not sit and wander as Mordecai did, bearing the
stamp of his people amid the signs of poverty and waning breath. Sensitive to
physical characteristics, he had, both abroad and in England, looked at pictures
as well as men, and in a vacant hour he had sometimes lingered in the National
Gallery in search of paintings which might feed his hopefulness with grave and
noble types of the human form, such as might well belong to men of his own race.
But he returned in disappointment. The instances are scattered but thinly over
the galleries of Europe, in which the fortune or selection even of the chief
masters has given to Art a face at once young, grand, and beautiful, where, if
there is any
