Cosmo was so entire, so utterly honest, so like a woman, that he
could not but regard the channel through which anything reached
him, as of the nature of that which came to him through it; how
could that serve to transmit which was not one in spirit with the
thing transmitted? To his eyes, therefore, Jermyn sat in the reflex
glory of Shelley, and of every other radiant spirit of which he had
widened his knowledge. How could Cosmo for instance regard him as a
common man through whom came to him first that thrilling
trumpet-cry, full of the glorious despair of a frustrate divinity,
beginning,
O wild west wind, thou breath of autumn's being,
--the grandest of all pagan pantheistic utterances he was ever
likely to hear! The whole night, and many a night after, was Cosmo
haunted with the aeolian music of its passionate, self-pitiful
self-abandonment. And in his dreams, the "be thou me, impetuous
one!" of the poem, seemed fulfilled in himself--for he and the wind
were one, careering wildly along the sky, combing out to their
length the maned locks of the approaching storm, and answering the
cry of weary poets everywhere over the world.
As he sat by his patient's bed, Jermyn would also tell him about
his travels, and relate passages of adventure in various parts of
the world; and he came oftener, and staid longer, and talked more
and more freely, until at length in Cosmo's vision, the more
impressible perhaps from his weakness, the doctor seemed a hero, an
admirable Crichton; a paragon of doctors.
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