book:
to learn was impossible; it was even disgusting to him. But his was a
nature which, foiled in one direction, must, absolutely helpless against
its own vitality, straightway send out its searching roots in another.
Of all forces, that of growth is the one irresistible, for it is the
creating power of God, the law of life and of being. Therefore no
accumulation of refusals, and checks, and turnings, and forbiddings,
from all the good old grannies in the world, could have prevented Robert
from striking root downward, and bearing fruit upward, though, as in all
higher natures, the fruit was a long way off yet. But his soul was only
sad and hungry. He was not unhappy, for he had been guilty of nothing
that weighed on his conscience. He had been doing many things of late,
it is true, without asking leave of his grandmother, but wherever prayer
is felt to be of no avail, there cannot be the sense of obligation save
on compulsion. Even direct disobedience in such case will generally
leave little soreness, except the thing forbidden should be in its own
nature wrong, and then, indeed, 'Don Worm, the conscience,' may begin to
bite. But Robert felt nothing immoral in playing upon his grandfather's
violin, nor even in taking liberties with a piece of lumber for which
nobody cared but possibly the dead; therefore he was not unhappy, only
much disappointed, very empty, and somewhat gloomy. There was nothing
to look forward to now, no secret full of riches and endless in hope--in
short, no violin.

To feel the full force of his loss, my reader must remember that around
the childhood of Robert, which he was fast leaving behind him, there had
gathered no tenderness--none at least by him recognizable as such. All
the women he came in contact with were his grandmother and Betty. He
had no recollection of having ever been kissed. From the darkness and
negation of such an embryo-existence, his nature had been unconsciously
striving to escape--struggling to get from below ground into the sunlit
air--sighing after a freedom he could not have defined, the freedom that
comes, not of independence, but of love--not of lawlessness, but of
the perfection of law. Of this beauty of life, with its wonder and its
deepness, this unknown glory, his fiddle had been the type. It had been
the ark that held, if not the tables of the covenant, yet the golden pot
of angel's food, and the rod that budded in death. And now that it was
gone, the gloomier a