Ought one to
be ashamed if that kind of generous enthusiasm, that intensity of
admiration, that vividness of sympathy die out of one's heart? Is
it possible to keep alive the warmth, the colour of youth,
suffusing all the objects near it with a lively and rosy glow? Some
few people seem to find it possible, and can add to it a kind of
rich tolerance, a lavish affectionateness, which pierces even
deeper, and sees even more clearly, than the old partial
idealisation. Such a large-hearted affection is found as a rule
most often in people whose lives have brought them into intimate
connection with their fellow-creatures--in priests, doctors,
teachers, who see others not in their guarded and superficial
moments, but in hours of sharp and poignant emotion. In many cases
the bounds of sympathy narrow themselves into the family and the
home--because there only are men brought into an intimate
connection with human emotion; because to many people, and to the
Anglo-Saxon race in particular, emotional situations are a strain,
and only professional duty, which is a strongly rooted instinct in
the Anglo-Saxon temperament, keeps the emotional muscles agile and
responsive.
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