But of all that he was as ignorant as a
child; and the first revelation of his dormant nature was to come to him
through the face of woman,--that work of the Mighty Master which is to
be found in all lands and ages.
What makes the love of a great mind something fearful in its inception
is that it is often the unsealing of a hitherto undeveloped portion of
a large and powerful being; the woman may or may not seem to other eyes
adequate to the effect produced, but the man cannot forget her, because
with her came a change which makes him forever a different being. So it
was with our friend. A woman it was that was destined to awaken in him
all that consciousness which music, painting, poetry awaken in more
evenly developed minds; and it is the silent breathing of her creative
presence that is even now creating him anew, while as yet he knows it
not.
He never thought, this good old soul, whether Mary were beautiful or
not; he never even knew that he looked at her; nor did he know why it
was that the truths of his theology, when uttered by her tongue, had
such a wondrous beauty as he never felt before. He did not know why it
was, that, when she silently sat by him, copying tangled manuscript for
the press, as she sometimes did, his whole study seemed so full of some
divine influence, as if, like St. Dorothea, she had worn in her bosom,
invisibly, the celestial roses of paradise. He recorded honestly in his
diary what marvellous freshness of spirit the Lord had given him, and
how he seemed to be uplifted in his communings with heaven, without once
thinking from the robes of what angel this sweetness had exhaled.
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