His
attitude at this time recalls a suggestion of his own in "Sights from a
Steeple": "The most desirable mode of existence might be that of a
spiritualized Paul Pry, hovering invisible round man and woman,
witnessing their deeds, searching into their hearts, borrowing
brightness from their felicity, and shade from their sorrow, and
retaining no emotion peculiar to himself." He had the longing which
every creative mind must feel, to mix with other beings and share to the
utmost the possibilities of human weal or woe, suppressing his own
experience so far as to make himself a transparent medium for the
emotions of mankind; but he still lacked a definite connection with the
multifarious drama of human fellowship; he could not catch his cue and
play his answering part, and therefore gave voice to a constantly
murmurous, moralizing "aside." He delights to let the current of action
flow around him and beside him; he warms his heart in it; but when he
again withdraws by himself, it is with him as with the old toll-gatherer
at close of day, "mingling reveries of Heaven with remembrances of
earth, the whole procession of mortal travellers, all the dusty
pilgrimage which he has witnessed, seems like a flitting show of
phantoms for his thoughtful soul to muse upon."
"What would a man do," he asks himself, in his journal, "if he were
compelled to live always in the sultry heat of society, and could never
bathe himself in cool solitude?" As yet, this bracing influence of
quietude, so essential to his well-being, fascinates him, and he cannot
shake off its influence so far as to enter actively and for personal
interests into any of the common pursuits even of the man who makes a
business of literature.
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