A book for the delighted reading of a scholar, willing to ponder at
leisure, to make his way surely, and understand. Very different,
certainly, from the cruel-featured little idol his mother had brought
in her bundle--the old Scythian Artemis, hanging there on the wall,
side by side with the forgotten Ares, blood-red,--the goddess reveals
herself to the lad, poring through the dusk by taper-light, as at
once a virgin, necessarily therefore the creature of solitude, yet
also as the assiduous nurse of children, and patroness of the young.
Her friendly intervention at the act of birth everywhere, her claim
upon the nursling, among tame and wild creatures equally, among men
as among gods, nay! among the stars (upon the very star of dawn),
gave her a breadth of influence seemingly coextensive with the sum of
things. Yes! his great mother was in touch with everything. Yet
throughout he can but note her perpetual chastity, with pleasurable
though half-suspicious wonder at the mystery, he knows not what,
involved therein, as though he awoke suddenly in some distant,
unexplored region of her person and activity. [169] Why the lighted
torch always, and that long straight vesture rolled round so
formally? Was it only against the cold of these northern heights?
To her, nevertheless, her maternity, her solitude, to this virgin
mother, who, with no husband, no lover, no fruit of her own, is so
tender to the children of others, in a full heart he devotes himself-
-his immaculate body and soul.
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