But we have lingered long enough in these painted courts. The worth of
the thing signified must vindicate our taste for the emblem. Everything
that is called fashion and courtesy humbles itself before the cause and
fountain of honor, creator of titles and dignities, namely the heart of
love. This is the royal blood, this the fire, which, in all countries
and contingencies, will work after its kind and conquer and expand
all that approaches it. This gives new meanings to every fact. This
impoverishes the rich, suffering no grandeur but its own. What is rich?
Are you rich enough to help anybody? to succor the unfashionable and the
eccentric? rich enough to make the Canadian in his wagon, the itinerant
with his consul's paper which commends him "To the charitable," the
swarthy Italian with his few broken words of English, the lame pauper
hunted by overseers from town to town, even the poor insane or besotted
wreck of man or woman, feel the noble exception of your presence and
your house from the general bleakness and stoniness; to make such feel
that they were greeted with a voice which made them both remember and
hope? What is vulgar but to refuse the claim on acute and conclusive
reasons? What is gentle, but to allow it, and give their heart and yours
one holiday from the national caution? Without the rich heart, wealth is
an ugly beggar. The king of Schiraz could not afford to be so bountiful
as the poor Osman who dwelt at his gate. Osman had a humanity so broad
and deep that although his speech was so bold and free with the Koran
as to disgust all the dervishes, yet was there never a poor outcast,
eccentric, or insane man, some fool who had cut off his beard, or who
had been mutilated under a vow, or had a pet madness in his brain, but
fled at once to him; that great heart lay there so sunny and hospitable
in the centre of the country, that it seemed as if the instinct of all
sufferers drew them to his side. And the madness which he harbored he
did not share. Is not this to be rich? this only to be rightly rich?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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