My profession has been that of a tutor, and it thus befell that I
was under the necessity of learning as much as I was able, and even
going out of my way to seek those lessons at which all the pages of
life are open for us, and even, as it were, turning over wayside
stones, and looking under wayside weeds in the search for them; and
it scarcely ever chanced that I did not get some slight savour of
knowledge therefrom, though I was far enough from the full solution
of the problems. And through these lessons I seemed to gain some
increase of wisdom not only of the matters of which the lessons
themselves treated, such as the courses of the stars and planets,
the roots of herbs, and Latin verbs and algebraic quantities, and
evil and good, but of their bearing upon the human heart. That I
have ever held to be the most important knowledge of all, and the
only reason for the setting of those lessons which must pass like
all things mortal, and can only live in so far as they have turned
that part of the scholar, which has hold of immortality, this or
that way.
I know not how it may be with other men, but of one branch of
knowledge, which pertains directly to the human heart, and, when it
be what its name indicates, to its eternal life, I gained no insight
whatever from my books and my lessons, nor from my observance of its
workings in those around me, and that was the passion of love. Of
that I truly could learn naught except by turning my reflections
toward my own heart.
And I know not how this also may be with other men, but love with me
had a beginning, though not an end and never shall have, and a
completeness of growth which makes it visible to my thought like the
shape of an angel. I have loved not in one way, but in every way
which the heart of man could conceive. There is no tone of love
which the heart holds for the striking which I have not heard like a
bell through my furthermost silences. I can truly say that when I
rode to church with Mary Cavendish that morning in April, though I
loved in my whole life her and her alone, and was a most solitary
man as far as friends and kinsfolk went, yet not one in the whole
Kingdom of Virginia had fuller knowledge of love in all its shades
of meaning than I. For I had loved Mary Cavendish like a father and
like a lover, like a friend and a brother, like a slave and like a
master, and such love I had for her that I could see her good beyond
her pain, and would have had the courage to bear her pain, though
God knows her every pang was my twenty. And it had been thus with me
near sixteen years, since I was fourteen and she was a little maid
of two, and I lived neighbour to her in Suffolkshire. I can see
myself at fourteen and laugh at the picture. All of us have our
phases of comedy, our seasons when we are out of perspective and
approach the grotesque and furnish our own jesters for our after
lives.