The desire of fame, so vaunted, is the ruin of the small, sometimes
of the great poet. The next evil to doing anything for love of
money, is doing it for the love of fame. A man may have a wife who
is all the world to him, but must he therefore set her on a throne?
Cosmo, essentially and peculiarly practical, never thought of the
world and his verses together, but gathered life for himself in the
making of them.
These children of his, like all real children, strengthened his
heart, and upheld his hands. In them Truth took to him shape; in
them she submitted herself to his contemplation. He grew faster,
and from the days of his mourning emerged more of a man, and abler
to look the world in the face.
From that time also he learned and understood more rapidly, though
he never came to show any great superiority in the faculties most
prized of this world, whose judgment differs from that of God's
kingdom in regard to the comparative value of intellectual gifts
almost as much as it does in regard to the relative value of the
moral and the intellectual. Not the less desirable however did it
seem in the eyes of both his father and his tutor, that, if it
could anyhow be managed, he should go the next winter to college.
As to how it could be managed, the laird took much serious thought,
but saw no glimmer of light in the darkness of apparent
impossibility. An unsuspected oracle was however at hand.
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