confoundedly persuaded, that we felt there was nothing in his exhibition
of life that they didn't or couldn't account for. They pervaded and
supported his existence, and very considerably our own; but what comes
back to me, to the production of a tenderness and an admiration scarce
to be expressed, is the fact that though we thus easily and naturally
lived with them and indeed, as to their more general effects, the colour
and savour they gave to his talk, breathed them in and enjoyed both
their quickening and their embarrassing presence, to say nothing of
their almost never less than amusing, we were left as free and
unattacked by them as if they had been so many droppings of gold and
silver coin on tables and chimney-pieces, to be "taken" or not according
to our sense and delicacy, that is our felt need and felt honour. The
combination in him of his different vivacities, his living interest in
his philosophy, his living interest in us and his living superiority to
all greed of authority, all overreaching or overemphasising "success",
at least in the heated short run, gave his character a magnanimity by
which it was impossible to us not to profit in all sorts of responsive
and in fact quite luxurious ways. It was a luxury, I to-day see, to have
all the benefit of his intellectual and spiritual, his religious, his
philosophic and his social passion, without ever feeling the pressure of
it to our direct irritation or discomfort. It would perhaps more truly
figure the relation in which he left us to these things to have likened
our opportunities rather to so many scattered glasses of the liquor of
faith, poured-out cups stood about for our either sipping or draining
down or leaving alone, in the measure of our thirst, our curiosity or
our strength of head and heart. If there was much leaving alone in
us--and I freely confess that, so far as the taking any of it all
"straight" went, my lips rarely adventured--this was doubtless because
we drank so largely at the source itself, the personally overflowing and
irrigating. What it then comes to, for my present vision, was that he
treated us most of all on the whole, as he in fact treated everything,
by his saving imagination--which set us, and the more as we were
naturally so inclined, the example of living as much as we might in some
such light of our own. If we had been asked in our younger time for
instance what _were_ our father's ideas, or to give an example of one
of them, I think we should promptly have answered (I should myself have
hastened to do so) that the principal was a devoted attachment to the
writings of Swedenborg; as to whom we were to remember betimes, with
intimate appreciation, that in reply to somebody's plea of not finding
him credible our parent had pronounced him, on the contrary, fairly
"insipid with veracity." We liked that partly, I think, because it
disposed in a manner, that is in favour of our detachment, of the great
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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