He slid more and more into
writing out the necessities and experiences of his own heart and
history, and so by degrees gained power of the only true kind--that,
namely, of rousing the will, not merely the passions, or even the
aspirations of men. The poetry in which he had disported himself at
college now came to the service of his prose, and the deeper poetic
nature, which is the prophetic in every man, awoke in him. Till after
they had lived together a good many years the wife did not know the
worth of the man she had married, nor indeed was he half the worth when
she married him that he had now grown to be. The longer they lived the
prouder she grew of him and of his work; nor was she the less the
practical wisdom of the house that she looked upon her husband as a
great man. He was not a great man--only a growing man; yet was she
nothing the worse for thinking so highly of him; the object of it was
not such that her admiration caused her to deteriorate.
The daughter of a London barrister, of what is called a good family, she
had opportunity of knowing something of what is called life before she
married, and from mere dissatisfaction had early begun to withdraw from
the show and self-assertion of social life, and seek within herself the
door of that quiet chamber whose existence is unknown to most.
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