Life with its ambitious and cankerous desires wakes again. You
do not feel them at first; the subjugation of holy thoughts and of
reaches toward the Infinite, leave their traces on you, and perhaps
bewilder you into a half-consciousness of strength. But at the first
touch of the grosser elements about you,--on your very first entrance
upon those duties which quicken pride or shame, and which are pointing
at you from every quarter,--your holy calm, your high-born purpose, your
spiritual cleavings, pass away, like the electricity of August storms
drawn down by the thousand glittering turrets of a city!
The world is stronger than the night; and the bindings of sense are
tenfold stronger than the most exquisite delirium of soul. This makes
you feel, or will one day make you feel, that life,--strong life and
sound life,--that life which lends approaches to the Infinite, and takes
hold on Heaven, is not so much a PROGRESS as it is a RESISTANCE!
There is one special confidence which, in all your talk about plans and
purposes, you do not give to your father: you reserve that for the ear
of Nelly alone. Why happens it that a father is almost the last
confidant that a son makes in any matter deeply affecting the feelings?
Is it the fear that a father may regard such matter as boyish? Is it a
lingering suspicion of your own childishness; or of that extreme of
affection which reduces you to childishness?
Why is it always that a man, of whatever age or condition, forbears to
exhibit to those whose respect for his judgment and mental abilities
only he seeks, the most earnest qualities of the heart, and those
intenser susceptibilities of love which underlie his nature, and which
give a color in spite of him to the habit of his life? Why is he so
morbidly anxious to keep out of sight any extravagances of affection,
when he blurts officiously to the world his extravagances of action and
of thought? Can any lover explain me this?
Again, why is a sister the one of all others to whom you first whisper
the dawnings of any strong emotion,--as if it were a weakness that her
charity alone could cover?
However this may be, you have a long story for Nelly's ear.
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