Once--twice--Ben-Hur was relieved; but he could not sleep. Three
years of night, and through the darkness a sunbeam at last! At sea
adrift and lost, and now land! Dead so long, and, lo! the thrill and
stir of resurrection. Sleep was not for such an hour. Hope deals
with the future; now and the past are but servants that wait on
her with impulse and suggestive circumstance. Starting from the
favor of the tribune, she carried him forward indefinitely.
The wonder is, not that things so purely imaginative as the
results she points us to can make us so happy, but that we can
receive them as so real. They must be as gorgeous poppies under
the influence of which, under the crimson and purple and gold,
reason lies down the while, and is not. Sorrows assuaged, home
and the fortunes of his house restored; mother and sister in
his arms once more--such were the central ideas which made him
happier that moment than he had ever been. That he was rushing,
as on wings, into horrible battle had, for the time, nothing to
do with his thoughts. The things thus in hope were unmixed with
doubts--they WERE. Hence his joy so full, so perfect, there was
no room in his heart for revenge. Messala, Gratus, Rome, and all
the bitter, passionate memories connected with them, were as dead
plagues--miasms of the earth above which he floated, far and safe,
listening to singing stars.
The deeper darkness before the dawn was upon the waters, and all
things going well with the Astroea, when a man, descending from
the deck, walked swiftly to the platform where the tribune slept,
and awoke him.
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