Happily,
however, he bethought himself in time not to tell her the thing
was worthless: such a word, instead of chipping the shell in
which the girl's faculty lay dormant, would have smashed the
whole egg into a miserable albuminous mass. And he was well
rewarded; for, the same day, in the evening, he heard her singing
gayly over her work, and listening discovered that she was
singing verse after verse of one of the best ballads in the whole
book. She had chosen with the fancy of pleasing Godfrey; she sang
to please herself. After this discovery he set himself in earnest
to the task of developing her intellectual life, and, daily
almost, grew more interested in the endeavor. His main object was
to make her think; and for the high purpose, chiefly but not
exclusively, he employed verse.
The main obstacle to success he soon discovered to be Letty's
exceeding distrust of herself. I would not be mistaken to mean
that she had too little confidence in herself; of that no one can
have too little. Self-distrust will only retard, while self-
confidence will betray. The man ignorant in these things will
answer me, "But you must have one or the other." "You must have
neither," I reply. "You must follow the truth, and, in that
pursuit, the less one thinks about himself, the pursuer, the
better. Let him so hunger and thirst after the truth that the dim
vision of it occupies all his being, and leaves no time to think
of his hunger and his thirst.
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