The Heart

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.