We toil not for time, but for eternity.”
CHAPTER XIII.
GENERAL INTERESTS.
“Works are no more than animate faith and love.”
Longfellow.
In spite of the heavy demands of her own special duties, Miss Buss found time for much public work in which to use her large experience.
She always knew exactly what she was doing and what she intended to do. In the expressive colloquialism, she was “all there,” and she was always there. Whatever she knew she knew well, putting it in its own place, ready for use. The half-knowledge, with its consequent mental vagueness, that contents most of us was impossible to a mind so clear and strong.
And she knew her own limitations, never professing to go beyond. When we remember how wonderfully vivid her imagination really was, we are surprised that it could so be held in leash. In art she gave it free play; and also in history—the story of human life which is the subject of art—she could let herself go. We who knew her in Rome could never question her power of imagination.
In Italy, she not only found but she used her wings. Elsewhere, her imagination found fullest scope in glorifying common things; in seeing through the commonplace, thus consecrating common duties, and calling out the best and highest in common persons—possibly a form of genius more rare than that which can turn out fine verse or fine pictures.
Here is a list of work which it overwhelms the average mortal merely to contemplate. But wherever she found herself she worked, and nothing that she undertook to do was left undone.