When it says his finger-tips were perfected by delicate rectitude of
use, I think it means doing everything as it is done in heaven, and
that anybody who wants to make a perfect violin must keep his eye
open to all the beautiful things God has made, and his ear open to
all the music he has put into the world, and then never let his hands
touch a piece of work that is crooked or straggling or false, till,
after years and years of rightness, they are fit to make a violin
like the squire's, a violin that can say everything, a violin that an
angel wouldn't be ashamed to play on."
Do these words seem likely ones to fall from the lips of a lad who
had been at the tail of his class ever since his primer days? Well,
Anthony was seventeen now, and he was "educated," in spite of sorry
recitations--educated, the Lord knows how! Yes, in point of fact the
Lord does know how! He knows how the drill and pressure of the daily
task, still more the presence of the high ideal, the inspiration
working from within, how these educate us.
The blind Anthony Croft sitting in the kitchen doorway had seemingly
missed the heights of life he might have trod, and had walked his
close on fifty years through level meadows of mediocrity, a witch in
every finger-tip waiting to be set to work, head among the clouds,
feet stumbling, eyes and ears open to hear God's secret thought;
seeing and hearing it, too, but lacking force to speak it forth
again; for while imperious genius surmounts all obstacles, brushes
laws and formulas from its horizon, and with its own free soul sees
its "path and the outlets of the sky," potential genius for ever
needs an angel of deliverance to set it free.
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