benefactors of mankind are so at their own expense!"
"This is very different," cried Courtenaye, "from your early creed; then you held the onward-looking hope, and the internal consciousness, to be the noblest incentives, and he best rewards, of high endeavour."
"Then," replied the other, "I believed and hoped; now, alas! there are times when I do neither. I would give worlds to recall my early eagerness of composition, and my reliance on the mind's influence."
"You cannot doubt that influence," interrupted Norbourne: "from our veriest infancy we feed upon the thoughts of the dead; even your own strong and original mind has been cultivated by others. I never enter a library without being grateful to those whose moral existence has formed my own. Our sages, our poets, have left a world behind, formed of all that is good, beautiful, and true in our own. Not a life but owes to them some of its happiest hours; they are our favourites, our old, familiar friends."
