Suited to this was a courage as heroic as Leonidas' and sublime as
Paul's. The stormy days of the fifties and sixties gave evidence of
the physical side of this quality, and his entire life, of the moral.
He "feared no foe in shining armor," and rather courted than avoided a
passage at arms dialectic. Eminently a man of peace, and loving the
pursuits that make for it, he would see no principle of right unjustly
assailed without girding himself for the conflict, and standing where
the blows fell thickest.
Coming to this unknown country at an age when the ordinary mind takes
firmest grasp of all intellectual things, and being thus deprived of
that mental food necessary to satisfy and make strong, there was ever
after a hungering for the things he did not have, that would not be
satisfied. I remember talking with him once, while sitting on his
lumber wagon, resting his team in the cotton-wood bottoms east of
Atchison, and he bewailed as much as a man of his fiber could, the
fate that compelled him to toil day and night while his soul was
starving for that intellectual food which lay all around him, but
which he did not have time to gather and devour.
Pages:
469
470
471
472
473
474
475
476
477
478
479
480
481
482
483
484
485
486
487
488
489
490
491
492
493