He was
astonished to find how weak was the revulsion: we know more about our
feelings than about anything else, yet scarcely understand them at all;
they play what seem to us the strangest pranks--moving all the time by
laws divine.
The boy seemed in his usual health, and was sleeping
peacefully--dreaming pleasantly, for the ghost of a smile glinted about
his just parted lips. Then upon the father--who was not, with all his
hardness, devoid of imagination--came the wonder of watching a dreamer:
what might not be going on within that brain, inaccessible as the most
distant star?--yea far more inaccessible, for what were gravity and
distance compared with difficulties unnamed and unnamable! No
spirit-shallop has yet been found to float us across the gulf, say
rather the invisible line, that separates soul from soul. Splendrous
visions might be gliding through the soul of the sleeper--his child,
born of his body and his soul--and not one of them was open to him! not
one of the thoughts whose lambent smile-flame flitted about his child's
lips would pass from him to him! Could they be more divided if the child
were dead, than now when he lay, in his sight indeed, yet remote in
regions of separate existence?
But how much nearer to him in reality was the child when awake and about
the house? How much more did he know then of the thoughts, the loves,
the imaginations, the desires, the aspirations that moved in the heart
and brain of the child? For all that his contact with him came to, he
might as well be dead! A phantom of him moving silent about the house
fill the part as well! The boy was sickly: he might be taken from him
ere he had made any true acquaintance with him! he was just the child to
die young! He would see him again, it was to be hoped, in the other
world, but the boy would have so few memories of him, so few
associations with him that it would be hard to knot the new to the old!
He turned away, and went back to his room.
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