Page:Fourteen sonnets and poems.djvu/63

 who had given her gifts and art to the teaching of the young—

"Blessed is that teacher who in the midst of incessant rudimental humdrum and petty repetition is still able to suggest and embody in himself the sublime summit of a perfected science."

Regarding friendship between men and women, he writes:

"The man who loves his wife deeply and truly must necessarily be something of a lover of all women, and vice versa. As a man looks upon his wife, so he looks in a measure upon women in general. Not to love is equivalent to being dead. I would not exchange the friendship of one good woman for "the wealth of Ormus and of Ind." If I were necessitated to improvise my own deity, it would be woman. She alone is worthy of intimation as substitute, if we had to have one, for God. The man who has no friend among women, he of all others is most alone."

The halo of a love which had grown with him from boyhood crowned his own life; we catch some hint of its fine reserve and poetry in the verses to I. D. H. He seemed never to outgrow the youth; there remained to the very end something of the boy's extravagance of feeling and speech, with the child's uncompromised loyalitiesloyalties [sic]. It was a nature in which self-interest was so small an element, that notwithstanding its full measure of rich gifts, failed to