THE GLORY OF THE WAY 



the old Appian Way of eloquence. All efforts 

 to make Bannister academic were more or less 

 fruitless. He would not or could not dig labori 

 ously at the text-books. If he could not absorb 

 a theme along the lines of his emotions, the labour 

 of it discouraged him. &quot; What is the use of wast- 



O 



ing time with human guesses,&quot; he said to me, 

 &quot; when one can converse with the truth itself, by 

 putting his hand in that of the solitudes and walk 

 ing humbly with the silences ? After all, Nature 

 confides the ultimates that Aristotle only groped 

 at.&quot; I grew to love Bannister very much during 

 that last year of our companionship, but it needed 

 the after-perspective to understand him. I often 

 thought then that he was a seer. I can see now 

 that he was only an orator. But his oratory was 

 strangely affluent with the fecundity and waste of 

 Nature. Those of us who heard him afterward, 

 when he held multitudes spellbound, recall how 

 like he was to one of those great Western rivers 

 that wind sluggishly along in narrow channels, 

 carrying the soil with them, but liable at any 

 moment to whelm their banks and spread flash- 

 ingly into broad lagoons, rich with floating islands 

 and the plunder of zones. Then it was that his 

 shoreless volubility rose with Miltonic periods and 

 bellowed grandly through the deeps of time, and 

 his emotions swept us away like those waves that 

 &quot; o erthrew Busiris and his Memphian chivalry.&quot; 

 How much of this gift was the bestowal of Isis 

 herself, when he had lifted her curtain lying on 

 his back under the stars, who shall say ? And 



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