Let him be, I say again. He might have better Sunday thoughts; perhaps
he will have some day. At least he is a man, and a brave one; and as
the greater contains the less, surely before a man can be a good man,
he must be a brave one first, much more a man at all. Cowards, old
Odin held, inevitably went to the very bottom of Hela-pool, and by no
possibility, unless of course they became brave at last, could rise
out of that everlasting bog, but sank whining lower and lower, like
mired cattle, to all eternity in the unfathomable peat-slime. And if
the twenty-first chapter of the Book of Revelation, and the eighth
verse, is to be taken as it stands, their doom has not altered since
Odin's time, unless to become still worse.
Tom came up, over the home-close and through the barton-gate, through
the farm-yard, and stopped at last at the porch. The front door was
open, and the door beyond it; and ere he knocked, he stopped, looking
in silence at a picture which held him spellbound for a moment by its
rich and yet quiet beauty.
Tom was no artist, and knew no more of painting, in spite of his
old friendship with Claude, than was to be expected of a keen and
observant naturalist who had seen half the globe. Indeed, he had been
in the habit of snubbing Claude's profession; and of arriving, on
pre-Raphaelite grounds, at a by no means pre-Raphaelite conclusion.
"A picture, you say, is worth nothing unless you copy Nature.
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