Near him lived a woman,--a relative of his, I believe: one of
those women who absorb so much of the world's room and air, and have a
right to do it: a nature made up of grand, good pieces, with no mean
bits mortared in: fresh and child-like, too, with heat or tears ready
for any tale of wrong, or strongly spoken, true word. But strike against
one prejudice that woman had, her religious sect-feeling, and she was
hard and cruel as Nero. It was the stove-funnel in that temple.
Human nature is full of such unaccountable warts and birth-marks and
sixth fingers; and the best reason that I know of why all practical
schemes for a perfect social system have failed is, that they are so
perfect, so compact, that they ignore all these excrescences, these
untied ends, in making up their whole. Yet it is a wonderful bit of
mosaic, this Communist system: a place for every man, and every man in
his place; "to insure to each human being the freest development of his
faculties": there is a grand fragment of absolute truth in that, a going
back to primal Nature, to a like life with that of sunshine and pines, a
Utopia more Christ-like than the heaven (which Christ never taught) of
eternal harp-playing and golden streets.
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