Page:The Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow, a Book for an Idle Holiday - Jerome (1886).djvu/152

 No one who honours the aristocracy of mind can feel ashamed of acquaintanceship with them. Their damp-stained walls are sacred to the memory of noble names. If all the wisdom of the world and all its art—all the spoils that it has won from Nature, all the fire that it has snatched from Heaven—were gathered together and divided into heaps, and we could point and say, for instance:—These mighty truths were flashed forth in the brilliant salon, amidst the ripple of light laughter and the sparkle of bright eyes; and This deep knowledge was dug up in the quiet study, where the bust of Pallas looks serenely down on leather-scented shelves; and This heap belongs to the crowded street; and That to the daisied field,—the heap that would tower up high above the rest, as a mountain above hills, would be the one at which we should look up and say: this noblest pile of all—these glorious paintings and this wondrous music, these trumpet words, these solemn thoughts, these daring deeds, they were forged and fashioned amidst misery and pain in the sordid squalor of the city garret. There, from their eyries, while the world heaved and throbbed below, the kings of men sent forth their eagle thoughts to wing their flight through the ages. There, where the sunlight streaming through the broken panes, fell on rotting boards and crumbling walls; there, from their lofty thrones, those rag-clothed Joves have hurled their thunderbolts and shaken, before now, the earth to its foundations.