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 forever needs an angel
of deliverance to set it free.
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