I do not send you to become a barbarian settler,
but to bring home to the realms of civilization those ideas of physical
perfection, which as yet, alas! barbarism, rather than civilization, has
preserved. Do not despise your old love for the beautiful. Do not fancy
that because you have let it become an idol and a tyrant, it was not
therefore the gift of God. Cherish it, develop it to the last; steep your
whole soul in beauty; watch it in its most vast and complex harmonies,
and not less in its most faint and fragmentary traces. Only, hitherto you
have blindly worshipped it; now you must learn to comprehend, to master,
to embody it; to show it forth to men as the sacrament of Heaven, the
finger-mark of God!"
Who could resist such pleading from those lips? I at least could not.
CHAPTER XLI.
FREEDOM, EQUALITY, AND BROTHERHOOD.
Before the same Father, the same King, crucified for all alike, we had
partaken of the same bread and wine, we had prayed for the same spirit.
Side by side, around the chair on which I lay propped up with pillows,
coughing my span of life away, had knelt the high-born countess, the
cultivated philosopher, the repentant rebel, the wild Irish girl, her
slavish and exclusive creed exchanged for one more free and all-embracing;
and that no extremest type of human condition might be wanting, the
reclaimed Magdalene was there--two pale worn girls from Eleanor's asylum,
in whom I recognized the needlewomen to whom Mackaye had taken me, on
a memorable night, seven years before.
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