----
Such a madness, if any, was the madness of Walking Stewart: his health was
perfect; his spirits as light and ebullient as the spirits of a bird in
spring-time; and his mind unagitated by painful thoughts, and at peace
with itself. Hence, if he was not an amusing companion, it was because the
philosophic direction of his thoughts made him something more. Of
anecdotes and matters of fact he was not communicative: of all that he had
seen in the vast compass of his travels he never availed himself in
conversation. I do not remember at this moment that he ever once alluded
to his own travels in his intercourse with me except for the purpose of
weighing down by a statement grounded on his own great personal experience
an opposite statement of many hasty and misjudging travellers which he
thought injurious to human nature: the statement was this, that in all his
countless rencontres with uncivilized tribes, he had never met with any so
ferocious and brutal as to attack an unarmed and defenceless man who was
able to make them understand that he threw himself upon their hospitality
and forbearance.
On the whole, Walking Stewart was a sublime visionary: he had seen and
suffered much amongst men; yet not too much, or so as to dull the genial
tone of his sympathy with the sufferings of others. His mind was a mirror
of the sentient universe.--The whole mighty vision that had fleeted before
his eyes in this world,--the armies of Hyder-Ali and his son with oriental
and barbaric pageantry,--the civic grandeur of England, the great deserts
of Asia and America,--the vast capitals of Europe,--London with its
eternal agitations, the ceaseless ebb and flow of its 'mighty heart,'--
Paris shaken by the fierce torments of revolutionary convulsions, the
silence of Lapland, and the solitary forests of Canada, with the swarming
life of the torrid zone, together with innumerable recollections of
individual joy and sorrow, that he had participated by sympathy--lay like
a map beneath him, as if eternally co-present to his view; so that, in the
contemplation of the prodigious whole, he had no leisure to separate the
parts, or occupy his mind with details.
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