Doctor Kittredge found
that he was in advance of him in the knowledge of recent physiological
discoveries. He had taken pains to become acquainted with agricultural
chemistry; and the neighboring farmers owed him some useful hints
about the management of their land. He renewed his old acquaintance
with the classic authors. He loved to warm his pulses with Homer and
calm them down with Horace. He received all manner of new books and
periodicals, and gradually gained an interest in the events of the
passing time. Yet he remained almost a hermit, not absolutely refusing
to see his neighbors, nor ever churlish towards them, but on the other
hand not cultivating any intimate relations with them.
He had retired from the world a young man, little more than a youth,
indeed, with sentiments and aspirations all of them suddenly
extinguished. The first had bequeathed him a single huge sorrow, the
second a single trying duty. In due time the anguish had lost
something of its poignancy, the light of earlier and happier memories
had begun to struggle with and to soften its thick darkness, and even
that duty which he had confronted with such an effort had become an
endurable habit.
At a period of life when many have been living on the capital of their
acquired knowledge and their youthful stock of sensibilities until
their intellects are really shallower and their hearts emptier than
they were at twenty, Dudley Venner was stronger in thought and
tenderer in soul than in the first freshness of his youth, when he
counted but half his present years.
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