第24章

- My friend, the Professor, whom I have mentioned to you once or twice, told me yesterday that somebody had been abusing him in some of the journals of his calling.I told him that I didn't doubt he deserved it; that I hoped he did deserve a little abuse occasionally, and would for a number of years to come; that nobody could do anything to make his neighbors wiser or better without being liable to abuse for it; especially that people hated to have their little mistakes made fun of, and perhaps he had been doing something of the kind.- The Professor smiled.- Now, said I, hear what I am going to say.It will not take many years to bring you to the period of life when men, at least the majority of writing and talking men, do nothing but praise.Men, like peaches and pears, grow sweet a little while before they begin to decay.Idon't know what it is, - whether a spontaneous change, mental or bodily, or whether it is thorough experience of the thanklessness of critical honesty, - but it is a fact, that most writers, except sour and unsuccessful ones, get tired of finding fault at about the time when they are beginning to grow old.As a general thing, Iwould not give a great deal for the fair words of a critic, if he is himself an author, over fifty years of age.At thirty we are all trying to cut our names in big letters upon the walls of this tenement of life; twenty years later we have carved it, or shut up our jack-knives.Then we are ready to help others, and care less to hinder any, because nobody's elbows are in our way.So I am glad you have a little life left; you will be saccharine enough in a few years.

- Some of the softening effects of advancing age have struck me very much in what I have heard or seen here and elsewhere.I just now spoke of the sweetening process that authors undergo.Do you know that in the gradual passage from maturity to helplessness the harshest characters sometimes have a period in which they are gentle and placid as young children? I have heard it said, but Icannot be sponsor for its truth, that the famous chieftain, Lochiel, was rocked in a cradle like a baby, in his old age.An old man, whose studies had been of the severest scholastic kind, used to love to hear little nursery-stories read over and over to him.One who saw the Duke of Wellington in his last years describes him as very gentle in his aspect and demeanor.Iremember a person of singularly stern and lofty bearing who became remarkably gracious and easy in all his ways in the later period of his life.

And that leads me to say that men often remind me of pears in their way of coming to maturity.Some are ripe at twenty, like human Jargonelles, and must be made the most of, for their day is soon over.Some come into their perfect condition late, like the autumn kinds, and they last better than the summer fruit.And some, that, like the Winter-Nelis, have been hard and uninviting until all the rest have had their season, get their glow and perfume long after the frost and snow have done their worst with the orchards.Beware of rash criticisms; the rough and stringent fruit you condemn may be an autumn or a winter pear, and that which you picked up beneath the same bough in August may have been only its worm-eaten windfalls.Milton was a Saint-Germain with a graft of the roseate Early-Catherine.Rich, juicy, lively, fragrant, russet skinned old Chaucer was an Easter-Beurre; the buds of a new summer were swelling when he ripened.

- There is no power I envy so much - said the divinity-student - as that of seeing analogies and making comparisons.I don't understand how it is that some minds are continually coupling thoughts or objects that seem not in the least related to each other, until all at once they are put in a certain light, and you wonder that you did not always see that they were as like as a pair of twins.It appears to me a sort of miraculous gift.

[He is rather a nice young man, and I think has an appreciation of the higher mental qualities remarkable for one of his years and training.I try his head occasionally as housewives try eggs, -give it an intellectual shake and hold it up to the light, so to speak, to see if it has life in it, actual or potential, or only contains lifeless albumen.]

You call it MIRACULOUS, - I replied, - tossing the expression with my facial eminence, a little smartly, I fear.- Two men are walking by the polyphloesboean ocean, one of them having a small tin cup with which he can scoop up a gill of sea-water when he will, and the other nothing but his hands, which will hardly hold water at all, - and you call the tin cup a miraculous possession! It is the ocean that is the miracle, my infant apostle! Nothing is clearer than that all things are in all things, and that just according to the intensity and extension of our mental being we shall see the many in the one and the one in the many.Did Sir Isaac think what he was saying when he made HIS speech about the ocean, - the child and the pebbles, you know? Did he mean to speak slightingly of a pebble? Of a spherical solid which stood sentinel over its compartment of space before the stone that became the pyramids had grown solid, and has watched it until now! A body which knows all the currents of force that traverse the globe; which holds by invisible threads to the ring of Saturn and the belt of Orion! Abody from the contemplation of which an archangel could infer the entire inorganic universe as the simplest of corollaries! A throne of the all-pervading Deity, who has guided its every atom since the rosary of heaven was strung with beaded stars!