"You must read poetry, Richard, and _feel_ it; that is the way and the only way for youth to gain emotional experience.
'Magic mirror thou hast none Except thy manifest heart; and save thine own Anguish or ardor, else no amulet.'
When you have learned to feel, then you can play."
Richard was not a genius--thank God! It seemed impossible that he should be graduating; that he should be no longer her lovely, placid baby, who had done so much to heal an old hurt. Though he would have to go away for a few years for further study, he would come back to teach in the college and would perhaps some day be its president, like his father and grandfather. Then she could stay on in the house which was like the outer shell of her soul, not to leave it until she left this life. Richard might marry--ought to marry--a pretty, biddable girl like Cora Scott. Cora would do her duty by her mother-in-law.
Mrs. Lister's life, now so uneventful, had had its great sorrow, its unsatisfied passion. There was another love, stronger almost than that for husband and son, because its object needed no longer the loving affection which sought to serve him, had never, indeed, needed it while he lived.
It was at such times as this, upon holidays, anniversaries, and other great days, that she thought most of the past, most of her father in his white stock and his bands, he having been a clergyman as well as a scholar; of her mother who seemed to her dim recollection very different from, but who was, nevertheless, very much like herself; and most of all of her brother Basil, for whom she had the rare and passionate affection of sister for brother of a Dorothy Wordsworth or a Eugénie de Guerin; that affection which equals in intensity a lover's, which brooks no rival, and which is almost certain to result in misery.
She thought of them all now, sitting in her room. She could hear the laughter of the faculty and the boys and girls gathering for the procession; she knew that it was time for her to go, but she could not move. How long, long ago it all was! Yet how close they were, especially Basil, who had been of all most vivid, most bright.
Presently, moved by an irresistible impulse, she left her chair by the window and climbed the stairs into the low-pitched third story. There she laid her hand upon a door. She desired intensely to go in; the touch of the knob restored to her an old mood of grief, the phase in which one feels that seeking, importuning, one must find. Basil was here; his wide, bright gaze sought her eyes, as she often fancied, with reproach. All dead persons seemed to Mrs. Lister to look like that; her father did, as she remembered some little service unrendered, some command forgotten. Basil's gaze was like his father's, yet different. He seemed to reproach, not his sister, but his Creator for having laid him low, banishing him from the sunshine when his contemporaries still had years of life before them.