Kenelm Chillingly — Volume 06 by Baron Edward Bulwer Lytton Lytton
page 48 of 125 (38%)
page 48 of 125 (38%)
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this spontaneous, uncultured sympathy with the results of so many
laborious struggles of his own scholastic intellect against the dogma of the German giant, he felt as if he had found a younger--true, but oh, how much more subduing, because so much younger--sister of his own man's soul. Then came, so strongly, the sense of her sympathy with his own strange innermost self, which a man will never feel more than once in his life with a daughter of Eve, that he dared not trust himself to speak. He somewhat hurried his leave-taking. Passing in the rear of the garden towards the bridge which led to his lodging, he found on the opposite bank, at the other end of the bridge, Mr. Algernon Sidney Gale Jones peacefully angling for trout. "Will you not try the stream to-day, sir? Take my rod." Kenelm remembered that Lily had called Izaak Walton's book "a cruel one," and shaking his head gently, went his way into the house. There he seated himself silently by the window, and looked towards the grassy lawn and the dipping willows, and the gleam of the white walls through the girdling trees, as he had looked the eve before. "Ah!" he murmured at last, "if, as I hold, a man but tolerably good does good unconsciously merely by the act of living,--if he can no more traverse his way from the cradle to the grave, without letting fall, as he passes, the germs of strength, fertility, and beauty, than can a reckless wind or a vagrant bird, which, where it passes, leaves behind it the oak, the corn-sheaf, or the flower,--ah, if that be so, how tenfold the good must be, if the man find the gentler and purer duplicate of his own being in that mysterious, undefinable union which Shakspeares and day-labourers equally agree to call love; which Newton never recognizes, and which Descartes (his only rival in the realms of |
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