A Soul Melted Into a Voice
Passion, unabated emotion pervaded the great effort from the beginning to the end of the masterpiece. Every sentence, every word had been pruned of every ineffective syllable, like changing "penetrate" to the word of one syllable, "pierce". Every idea went to its mark like a bullet. There was not a cold or weak passage in it. In preparing his direct discourse he did not stick a stake and cart material to it. His great thoughts were not drawn from without but from his subject which he fathomed. He had depth, as someone said, for elephants to swim in and places for lambs to wade. He seemed from the first to be starting a great offensive. I took occasionally great delight in a few moments of his company and I always have congratulated myself that I lived for three years in the same town, and at the same time with so illustrious a person.
He is one of the stars, a planet I should say, in the firmament of the pulpit. "Go and feel his power" I used to say; no one can describe it. Everything seemed to conspire to make my life exceptionally happy and fortunate at Andover, knowing him at the zenith of his glory. Professor Park's work had the element of nicety about it. It was fascinating. We were spell-bound, lost in admiration, even in amazement. His elegance in diction would make one's sense of beauty ache. "Honor is the substance of my story," said the imposing, uplifting man starting on his moving recital, told in his unique, felicitous style, with utterance broken by emotion, of the life and death of Miss McKeen of Abbott Academy, of whose board of trustees he had been president for thirty years. That trinity of qualities, wisdom, eloquence, and pathos, swept everything. Rhetoric cannot be shut up in a book. Its play of words, even in a sympathetic auditory, and among vibrant hearers, while it sparkles, dies.
CHAPTER XVII
GOING BACK TO MY PADAN-ARAM
Ernest Renan tells us of the vanished city Is, which, years ago, disappeared below the waves. Up from those depths, fishermen say, that on calm summer nights they can hear the bells chiming. In my heart is a cherished Is. As the years rise and fall I love to hear the harmonies that float to me from its past. Distance does not dissipate the gentle sounds and they come to me like echoes from another life. At that enchanted time I met my heart's ideal and have been wondering ever since how it happened, that on seeing a certain face, it seems to you distinctive, set apart from all others. Is it familiar, because you have seen it before, or is it impressed on you, because it is an expression of your intuitive sense of what suits you, and what you like and what you want? The expression, love at first sight, would be intelligible enough if it was only finished with the words, when one's dream comes true. When it materializes it is of course all at once. A person busy with his profession, going along happily and more or less prosperously, meeting people, judging young folks, almost unconsciously forms an ideal of face, figure, graciousness, type, temperament, intelligence. This is the product of half a dozen years. The work of choosing, so far as he is concerned, is all done. His mind is made up. His idea is clearly defined. Jesse made Eliab pass before Samuel and the Lord said, "Look not on his countenance nor on his stature." Then Jesse called Abinadab, then Shammah, and seven passed in review, when David came along, who was ruddy and withal of a beautiful countenance, and goodly to look to, "That's the one. This is he." First there is an image in the mind, and when the counterpart appears, instantly, of course, one recognizes it. Samuel did not shirk any real question nor did he make up his mind before he had any mind to make up. There was a choice to be made and he had come to a conclusion so far as he was concerned, and expressed himself at the earliest moment, without being irresolute or vacillating, which is an abomination when a social choice is to be made.
First View of Intimate Friends
There is in us a tendency to selection and preference of one human being before all others. This action of the heart is forceful and even almost irresistible to us and yet may not accord with other persons' ideas of appropriateness. This strange preference, in its early stages, and in its strength and duration, is nature's greatest sidelight upon our individuality. It is entertaining to see what people pass right by and then to see what they choose. It distinguishes itself most at the further end of a long life and seems to have an unfading quality which shows that it is nature itself. This tendency to selection affords people the strongest argument against Dr. Johnson's position that all marriages would be better made if they were arranged by the Lord Chancellor. Also against that multitude of students, of the subject and writers, who show that marriages seem best, last best, and are best for a fact, when the parties themselves have little to do in bringing them about, when all such matters are left to parents and others as in the royal families who rest everything on the pure merits of the case.