Page:The leopard's spots - a romance of the white man's burden-1865-1900 (IA leopardsspotsrom00dixo).pdf/418

 the test, the masses of the North had even deeper repugnance to the person of a Negro than the Southerners who grew up with him from the cradle. He had found himself cut off from every honourable way of earning his bread, gentleman and scholar though he was, and had looked into the river as he walked over the bridge to Cambridge one night with a well-nigh resistless impulse to end it all.

But Lowell had cheered him, laughed his gloomy ideas to scorn, and more practical still, he had secured him a clerkship in the Custom House which settled the problem of bread. Others had failed him, but this man of trained powers had never failed him. He had taught him to lift up his head and look the world squarely in the face. Lowell was, to his vivid African imagination, the ideal man made in the image of God, calm in judgment, free from all superstitions and prejudices, a citizen of the world of human thought, a prince of that vast ethical aristocracy of the free thinkers of all ages who knew no racial or conventional barriers between man and man.

Harris had published a volume of poems which he had dedicated to Lowell, and his most inspiring verse was simply the outpouring of his soul in worship of this ideal man.

He was his devoted worshipper for another and more powerful reason. In his daily intercourse with him in his library during his campaigns he had frequently met his beautiful daughter, and had fallen deeply and madly in love with her. This secret passion he had kept hidden in his sensitive soul. He had worshipped her from afar as though she had been a white-robed angel. To see her and be in the same house with her was all he asked. Now and then he had stood beside the piano and turned the music while she played and sang one of his new pieces, and he would live on that scene for months, eating his heart out with voiceless yearnings he dared not express.