He knew what this Self within him was; he
knew how it had forced him to grope his way up, to give this
hungry, insatiate soul air and freedom and knowledge. All men
around him were doing the same,--thrusting and jostling and
struggling, up, up. It was the American motto, Go ahead; mothers
taught it to their children; the whole system was a scale of
glittering prizes. He at least saw the higher meaning of the
truth; he had no low ambitions. To lift this self up into a
higher range of being when it had done with the uses of
this,--that was his work. Self-salvation, self-elevation,--the
ideas that give birth to, and destroy half of our Christianity,
half of our philanthropy! Sometimes, sleeping instincts in the
man struggled up to assert a divinity more terrible than this
growing self-existent soul that he purified and analyzed day by
day: a depth of tender pity for outer pain; a fierce longing for
rest, on something, in something, he cared not what. He stifled
such rebellious promptings,--called them morbid. He called it
morbid, too, the passion now that chilled his strong blood, and
wrung out these clammy drops on his forehead, at the mere thought
of this girl below.
He shut the door of his room tightly: he had no time to-day for
lounging visitors. For Holmes, quiet and steady, was sought for,
if not popular, even in the free-and-easy West; one of those men
who are unwillingly masters among men. Just and mild, always;
with a peculiar gift that made men talk their best thoughts to
him, knowing they would be understood; if any core of eternal
flint lay under the simple, truthful manner of the man, nobody
saw it.
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