Nor smile so,
while I write that this little black was brilliant, for even blackness has
its brilliancy; behold yon lustrous ebony, panelled in king's cabinets.
But Pip loved life, and all life's peaceable securities; so that
the panic-striking business in which he had somehow unaccountably
become entrapped, had most sadly blurred his brightness; though, as ere
long will be seen, what was thus temporarily subdued in him,
in the end was destined to be luridly illumined by strange wild fires,
that fictitiously showed him off to ten times the natural lustre
with which in his native Tolland County in Connecticut, he had once
enlivened many a fiddler's frolic on the green; and at melodious
even-tide, with his gay ha-ha! had turned the round horizon into
one star-belled tambourine. So, though in the clear air of day,
suspended against a blue-veined neck, the pure-watered diamond drop will
healthful glow; yet, when the cunning jeweller would show you the diamond
in its most impressive lustre, he lays it against a gloomy ground,
and then lights it up, not by the sun, but by some unnatural gases.
Then come out those fiery effulgences, infernally superb; then the
evil-blazing diamond, once the divinest symbol of the crystal skies,
looks like some crown-jewel stolen from the King of Hell.
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