The first that he knew, poor man,
he was breathing an air of strange and subtile sweetness,--from what
paradise he never stopped his studies to inquire. He was like a great,
rugged elm, with all its lacings and archings of boughs and twigs, which
has stood cold and frozen against the metallic blue of winter sky,
forgetful of leaves, and patient in its bareness, calmly content in its
naked strength and crystalline definiteness of outline. But in April
there is a rising and stirring within the grand old monster,--a
whispering of knotted buds, a mounting of sap coursing ethereally from
bough to bough with a warm and gentle life; and though the old elm knows
it not, a new creation is at hand. Just so, ever since the good man had
lived at Mrs. Scudder's, and had the gentle Mary for his catechumen, a
richer life seemed to have colored his thoughts,--his mind seemed to
work with a pleasure as never before.
Whoever looked on the forehead of the good Doctor must have seen the
squareness of ideality giving marked effect to its outline. As yet
ideality had dealt only with the intellectual and invisible, leading to
subtile refinements of argument and exalted ideas of morals. But there
was lying in him, crude and unworked, a whole mine of those artistic
feelings and perceptions which are awakened and developed only by the
touch of beauty. Had he been born beneath the shadow of the great Duomo
of Florence, where Giotto's Campanile rises like the slender stalk of
a celestial lily, where varied marbles and rainbow-glass and gorgeous
paintings and lofty statuary call forth, even from childhood, the soul's
reminiscences of the bygone glories of its pristine state, his would
have been a soul as rounded and full in its sphere of faculties as that
of Da Vinci or Michel Angelo.
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