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Support the Monkey! Tell All your Friends and Teachers |
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Support the Monkey! Tell All your Friends and Teachers |
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“My brother and I were twins; and they say, you know, that twins ought to re- semble each other; but we were in all points a contrast. He had black fiery eyes, coal-black hair, a strong fine Roman profile, and a rich brown complexion. I had blue eyes, golden hair, a Greek outline, and a fair complexion. He was active and observing, I dreamy and inactive. He was generous to his friends and equals, but proud, dominant, overbearing, to inferiors, and utterly unmerciful to whatever set itself up against him. Truthful we both were; he from pride and courage, I from a sort of abstract ideality. We loved each other about as boys generally do,- off and on, and in general;- he was my father’s pet, and I my mother’s. “There was a morbid sensitiveness and acuteness of feeling in me on all possi- ble subjects, of which he and my father had no kind of understanding, and with which they could have no possible sympathy. But mother did; and so, when I had quarrelled with Alfred, and father looked sternly on me, I used to go off to mother’s room, and sit by her. I remember just how she used to look, with her pale cheeks, her deep, soft, serious eyes, her white dress,- she always wore white; and I used to think of her whenever I read in Revelations about the saints that were arrayed in fine linen, clean and white. She had a great deal of genius of one sort and another, particularly in music; and she used to sit at her organ, playing fine old majestic music of the Catholic Church, and singing with a voice more like an angel than a mortal woman; and I would lay my head down on her lap, and cry, and dream, and feel,- oh, immeasurably!- things that I had no language to say! |
