When that day
comes he stands in the midst and kindles a strong clear flame upon the
altar, and the fire burns and leaps and illuminates the whole temple of
love, which is indeed the holy of holies of the temple of life.
John Harrington, through five and thirty years of his life, had believed
that the patient labor of a powerful intellect could suffice to a man, in
its results, for the attainment of all that humanity most honors, even for
the wise and unerring government of humanity itself. To that end and in
that belief he had honestly given every energy he possessed, and had
sternly choked down every tendency he felt in his inner nature toward a
life less intellectual and more full of sympathy for the affairs of
individual mankind. With him to be strong was to be cold--to be warm was
to be weak and subject to error; a supreme devotion to his career and a
supreme disdain of all personal affections were the conditions of success
which he deemed foremostly necessary, and he had come to an almost
superstitious belief in the idea that the love of woman is the destruction
of the intellectual man.
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