"He had married a simple village girl, in whose eyes he was nobler
than the noblest--to whom he was the mirror, in which the real forms
of all things around were reflected. Who dares pity my poor village
schoolmaster? I fling his pity away. Had he not found in her love the
verdict of God, that he was worth loving? Did he not in her possess
the eternal and unchangeable? Were not her eyes openings through which
he looked into the great depths that could not be measured or
represented? She was his public, his society, his critic. He found in
her the heaven of his rest. God gave unto him immortality, and he was
glad. For his ambition, it had died of its own mortality. He read the
words of Jesus, and the words of great prophets whom he has sent; and
learned that the wind-tossed anemone is a word of God as real and true
as the unbending oak beneath which it grows--that reality is an
absolute existence precluding degrees. If his mind was, as his room,
scantily furnished, it was yet lofty; if his light was small, it was
brilliant. God lived, and he lived. Perhaps the highest moral height
which a man can reach, and at the same time the most difficult of
attainment, is the willingness to be _nothing_ relatively, so that he
attain that positive excellence which the original conditions of his
being render not merely possible, but imperative.
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