Usually one of two fates overtakes the obscure professional scholar
in this country: either he shrinks to the dimensions of a true
villager and deserts the vastness of his library; or he repudiates
the village and becomes a cosmopolitan recluse--lonely toiler among
his books. Few possess the breadth and equipoise which will enable
them to pass from day to day along mental paths, which have the
Forum of Augustus or the Groves of the Academy at one end and the
babbling square of a modern town at the other; remaining equally at
home amid ancient ideals and everyday realities.
It was the fate of the recluse that threatened him. He had been
born with the scholar's temperament--this furnished the direction;
before he had reached the age of twenty-five he had lost his wife
and two sons--that furrowed the tendency. During the years
immediately following he had tried to fill an immense void of the
heart with immense labors of the intellect. The void remained; yet
undoubtedly compensation for loneliness had been found in the
fixing of his affections upon what can never die--the inexhaustible
delight of learning.
Thus the life of the book-worm awaited him but for an interference
excellent and salutary and irresistible. This was the constant
companionship of a sister whose nature enabled her to find its
complete universe in the only world that she had ever known: she
walking ever broad-minded through the narrowness of her little
town; remaining white though often threading its soiling ways; and
from every life which touched hers, however crippled and confined,
extracting its significance instead of its insignificance, shy
harmonies instead of the easy discords which can so palpably be
struck by any passing hand.
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