But in truth he was a perfectly healthy person.
"You are, intellectually speaking, quite a puzzle to me," his friend
George Hillard wrote to him, once. "How comes it that, with so
thoroughly healthy an organization as you have, you have such a taste
for the morbid anatomy of the human heart, and such a knowledge of it,
too? I should fancy, from your books, that you were burdened with some
secret sorrow, that you had some blue chamber in your soul, into which
you hardly dared to enter yourself; but when I see you, you give me the
impression of a man as healthy as Adam in Paradise."
This very healthiness was his qualification for his office. By virtue of
his mental integrity and absolute moral purity, he was able to handle
unhurt all disintegrated and sinful forms of character; and when souls
in trouble, persons with moral doubts to solve and criminals wrote to
him for counsel, they recognized the healing touch of one whose pitying
immaculateness could make them well.
She who knew best his habitual tone through a sympathy such as has
rarely been given to any man, who lived with him a life so exquisitely
fair and high, that to speak of it publicly is almost irreverent, has
written:--
"He had the inevitable pensiveness and gravity of a person who possessed
what a friend has called his 'awful power of insight'; but his mood was
always cheerful and equal, and his mind peculiarly healthful, and the
airy splendor of his wit and humor was the light of his home.
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