The
sympathy of our own mind must go with the fellow-mind in its
struggles for freedom. It is like one captive calling to another
from behind his prison bars. But when we love the body too, and when
our reason tells us that the striving captive, if set free, must
die; when we remember that by some horrible, unnatural anomaly this
spirit, that at times seems divinity itself, is condemned to live in
this abominable prison and to perish there, with and in its fetters,
then the wave of exultant pleasure, of exuberant, arrogant triumph,
that swept over us, poor fellow-prisoners, watching those fetters
shaken and almost cast off, thunders back upon us, turned into the
bitterest humiliation. I felt it all--the pitiable mockery of man's
nature, the inexplicable, terrible union of a god and a brute in one
frame, and the god dependent on the brute, and both mortal--as I
looked at the slight, lovely form of the woman I loved, and saw it
rocked and swayed, and left pained and breathless with the struggles
of the powers within to assert and express themselves. It had so
happened that I had never seen her at work before. It was only
recently that she had been allowed to give up set studies for her
own creative fancy. For years she had been employed in acquiring the
technique of her art; and even beside these considerations, I had
not been with her in her moments of most tense application, and I
should not have been with her now but that I was needed as a tool in
the work.
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