The Professor at the Breakfast-TableHolmes, Oliver Wendell
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The Professor at the Breakfast-Table
Holmes, Oliver Wendell
American fiction -- 19th century; Conversation -- Fiction; Poetry
You must have sometimes noted this fact that I am going to remind you of
and to use for a special illustration. Riding along over a rocky road,
suddenly the slow monotonous grinding of the crushing gravel changes to
a deep heavy rumble. There is a great hollow under your feet,--a huge
unsunned cavern. Deep, deep beneath you in the core of the living
rock, it arches its awful vault, and far away it stretches its winding
galleries, their roofs dripping into streams where fishes have been
swimming and spawning in the dark until their scales are white as milk
and their eyes have withered out, obsolete and useless.
So it is in life. We jog quietly along, meeting the same faces, grinding
over the same thoughts, the gravel of the soul's highway,--now and then
jarred against an obstacle we cannot crush, but must ride over or round
as we best may, sometimes bringing short up against a disappointment,
but still working along with the creaking and rattling and grating
and jerking that belong to the journey of life, even in the
smoothest-rolling vehicle. Suddenly we hear the deep underground
reverberation that reveals the unsuspected depth of some abyss of
thought or passion beneath us.
I wish the girl would go. I don't like to look at her so much, and yet I
cannot help it. Always that same expression of something that I ought to
know,--something that she was made to tell and I to hear,--lying there
ready to fall off from her lips, ready to leap out of her eyes and make
a saint of me, or a devil or a lunatic, or perhaps a prophet to tell the
truth and be hated of men, or a poet whose words shall flash upon the
dry stubble-field of worn-out thoughts and burn over an age of lies in
an hour of passion.
It suddenly occurs to me that I may have put you on the wrong track. The
Great Secret that I refer to has nothing to do with the Three Words. Set
your mind at ease about that,--there are reasons I could give you which
settle all that matter. I don't wonder, however, that you confounded the
Great Secret with the Three Words.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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