or Newton,
many would have counted this yearning, taking it as the sublimer part for a man
to say, »If not I, then another,« and to hold cheap the meaning of his own life.
But the fuller nature desires to be an agent, to create, and not merely to look
on: strong love hungers to bless, and not merely to behold blessing. And while
there is warmth enough in the sun to feed an energetic life, there will still be
men to feel, »I am lord of this moment's change, and will charge it with my
soul.«
    But with that mingling of inconsequence which belongs to us all, and not
unhappily, since it saves us from many effects of mistake, Mordecai's confidence
in the friend to come did not suffice to make him passive, and he tried
expedients, pathetically humble, such as happened to be within his reach, for
communicating something of himself. It was now two years since he had taken up
his abode under Ezra Cohen's roof, where he was regarded with much goodwill as a
compound of workman, dominie, vessel of charity, inspired idiot, man of piety,
and (if he were inquired into) dangerous heretic. During that time little Jacob
had advanced into knickerbockers, and into that quickness of apprehension which
has been already made manifest in relation to hardware and exchange. He had also
advanced in attachment to Mordecai, regarding him as an inferior, but liking him
none the worse, and taking his helpful cleverness as he might have taken the
services of an enslaved Djinn. As for Mordecai, he had given Jacob his first
lessons, and his habitual tenderness easily turned into the teacher's
fatherhood. Though he was fully conscious of the spiritual distance between the
parents and himself, and would never have attempted any communication to them
from his peculiar world, the boy moved him with that idealising affection which
merges the qualities of the individual child in the glory of childhood and the
possibilities of a long future. And this feeling had drawn him on, at first
without premeditation, and afterwards with conscious purpose, to a sort of
outpouring in the ear of the boy which might have seemed wild enough to any
excellent man of business who overheard it. But none overheard when Jacob went
up to Mordecai's room on a day, for example, in which there was little work to
be done, or at an hour when the work was ended, and after a brief lesson in
English reading or in numeration, was induced to remain standing at his
teacher's knees,