He teaches the spiritual greatness of the smallest fidelity, and
the spiritual destruction in the most familiar temptations. The
Butterfly which he describes floats everywhere through his pages, and
it is broken wherever the heart of one of his characters breaks, for
there sin has clutched its victim. It floats about us lovingly to
attract our attention to higher things; and I am sure the radiant
delicacy of the winged creature throbbed on a flower near David Swan,
as he slept honestly through the perils of evil.
Every touch of inner meaning that he gives speaks of his affection,
his desire to bring us accounts of what he has learned of God's
benevolence, in his long walks on the thoroughfares and in the byways,
and over the uncontaminated open country, of human hope. Poverty,
trouble, sin, fraudulent begging, stupidity, conceit,--nothing forced
him absolutely to turn away his observation of all these usual rebuffs
to sympathy, if his inconvenience could be made another's gain. But he
was firm with a manliness that was uncringing before insolence, and
did not shrink from speaking home truths that pruned the injurious
branches of the will; yet he never could be insulting, because he had
no selfish end. As a comrade he led to higher perceptions and moods.
The men who chatted with him in the Salem Custom House, the Liverpool
Consulate, and elsewhere, never forgot that he was the most inspiring
man they had known. All this was work. The idle man, lazy in a drunken
carouse, is in a world of his own.
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