It was without that substratum of general
intelligence which the free white student has partly inherited and
partly acquired by observation and experience, without the labor
or the consciousness of study. The whole world of life, business,
society, was a sealed book to him, which no other hand might open
for him; while the field of literature was but a bright tangled
thicket before him.
That unconscious familiarity with the past which is as the
small-change of daily thought to us was a strange currency to his
mind. He had, indeed, the key to the value of each piece, and could,
with difficulty, determine its power when used by another, but he
did not give or receive the currency with instinctive readiness.
Two things had made him clearly the intellectual superior of his
fellows--the advantages of his early years by which he learned to
read, and the habit of meditation which the solitude of his stricken
life induced. This had made him a thinker, a philosopher far more
profound than his general attainments would naturally produce. With
the super-sensitiveness which always characterizes the afflicted,
also, he had become a most acute and subtle observer of the human
countenance, and read its infinite variety of expression with
ease and certainty. In two things he might be said to be profoundly
versed--the spirit of the Scriptures, and the workings of the
human heart.
Pages:
174
175
176
177
178
179
180
181
182
183
184
185
186
187
188
189
190
191
192
193
194
195
196
197
198