They have given plenty of testimony as to the
good-fellowship of a nature which could be so silent at will.
He was usually reserved, but he was ready for action all the time. His
full, smooth lips, sensitive as a child's, would tell a student of
facial lines how vivid was his life, though absolutely under his cool
command. He was a delightful companion even when little was said,
because his eyes spoke with a sort of apprehension of your thought, so
that you felt that your expression of face was a clear record for him,
and that words would have been a sort of anticlimax. His companionship
was exquisitely restful, since it was instinctively sympathetic. He
did not need to exert himself to know you deeply, and he saw all the
good in you there was to know; and the weakness and the wrong of any
heart he weighed as nicely in the balance of tender mercy as we could
do in pity for ourselves. I always felt a great awe of him, a
tremendous sense of his power. His large eyes, liquid with blue and
white light and deep with dark shadows, told me even when I was very
young that he was in some respects different from other people. He
could be most tender in outward action, but he never threw such action
away. He knew swine under the cleverest disguise. I speak of outward
acts of tenderness. As for his spirit, it was always arousing mine,
or any one's, and acting towards one's spiritual being invisibly and
silently, but with gentle earnestness. He evinced by it either a
sternly sweet dignity of tolerance, or an approbation generous as a
broad meadow, or a sadly glanced, adverse comment that lashed one's
inner consciousness with remorse.
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