Trelawny in some painful or preoccupied moment, or offended the
robust man of the world by the mere delicate shyness of his look; he
might also have puzzled and bewildered Mr. Hogg, being, perhaps,
puzzled and bewildered himself, by some subtile mental
speculation,--unconscious that for these things he was yet to be brought
to judgment and turned into ridicule, for the coming generation, by
these familiar men,--these drilled and pipe-clayed familiar men. He
might have tossed up a paradox or two to keep the muscles of his mind
in exercise on a cold day, and his rapid intellect may have run away
from his hearer, trampling on the conventions and platitudes in its
course; but Mr. Hogg does not think he had fixed notions concerning
anything. The poet did not nail his colors with a cheer to the mast
of any of the great questions of the day, ethical or social, and
therefore suffered the disparagements of those intelligent friends of
his who have been taught to consider a well-defined rigidity of
conviction and maintenance, in the midst of all these phenomena of
our universe, telluric and uranological, as the test of everything
valuable in human character and morals.
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