The Memories of Fifty Years: Containing Brief Biographical Notices of Distinguished Americans, and Anecdotes of Remarkable Men; Interspersed with Scenes and Incidents Occurring during a Long Life of Observation Chiefly Spent in the SouthwestSparks, W. H. (William Henry)
History
The Memories of Fifty Years: Containing Brief Biographical Notices of Distinguished Americans, and Anecdotes of Remarkable Men; Interspersed with Scenes and Incidents Occurring during a Long Life of Observation Chiefly Spent in the Southwest
Sparks, W. H. (William Henry)
Georgia -- History -- 1775-1865; Southwest, Old -- History; United States -- Biography
Alone, and kindly shielded with the darkness, the adventurer lay
thoughtful and sleepless. Here are two strange beings. There is in the
one angelic beauty animated with a soul of giant proportions, large in
love, large in hate, and grandly large in its aspirations; and yet it
is chained to a rock with fetters that chafe at every motion. The other
cold, emotionless, with a reserved severity of manner, which is the
offspring of a heart as malignant and sinister as Satan himself may
boast of. They hate each other, but how different that hatred! The one
is an emotion fierce and fiery but without malice; the other malicious
and revengeful. One is the hatred of the recipient of an injury who can
forgive; the other the hatred of one who has inflicted an injury with
calculation. Such never forgive. And this I am sure is the relation of
this brother and sister. Deprived when yet young of the fostering care
of a mother, scarcely remembering her father, she has been the ward of
this cold, hard being, whose pleasure it has been to thwart every wish
of this lovely being: to hate her because she is lovely, and to
aggravate into fury her resentments, and to sour every generous impulse
of her extraordinary nature. What a curse to have so sensitive a being
subjected to the training of so cold and malignant a one!
There is no natural affection. The heart is born a waste: its loves,
its hates are of education and association; and the responsibility for
the future of a child rests altogether with those intrusted with its
rearing and training. The susceptibilities only are born with the
heart, and these may be cultivated to good or evil, as imperceptibly as
the light permeates the atmosphere. These capacities or
susceptibilities are acute or obtuse as the cranium's form will
indicate, and require a system suited to each. Attention soon teaches
this: the one grows and expands beautifully with the slightest
attention; the other is a fat soil, and will run to weeds, without
constant, close, and deep cultivation, and its production of good fruit
is in exact proportion with its fertility and care. It gives the most
trouble but it yields the greatest product. And here in that warm,
impulsive heart is the fat soil. O! for the hand to weed away all that
is noxious now rooting there. That look, that whispered bitterness was
the fruit of wicked wrong--I know it; the very nature prompting there
would give the sweetest return to justice, kindness, and love.
CHAPTER XXII.
THE ROMANCE CONTINUED.
FATHER CONFESSOR--OPEN CONFESSION--THE UNREAD WILL--OLD TONEY'S
NARRATIVE--SQUIRREL SHOOTING--THE FAREWELL UNSAID--BROTHERS-IN-LAW--
FAREWELL INDEED.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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