第 7 节
作者:辣椒王      更新:2021-04-30 16:57      字数:3284
  leaves me with the grief of a friend。  No ones indeed; could meet John
  Codman Ropes without wishing to be his friend; or without finding a
  friend in him。  He had his likes and his dislikes; but he could have had
  no enmities except for evil and meanness。  I never knew a man of higher
  soul; of sweeter nature; and his whole life was a monument of character。
  It cannot wound him now to speak of the cruel deformity which came upon
  him in his boyhood; and haunted all his after days with suffering。  His
  gentle face showed the pain which is always the part of the hunchback;
  but nothing else in him confessed a sense of his affliction; and the
  resolute activity of his mind denied it in every way。  He was; as is well
  known; a very able lawyer; in full practice; while he was making his
  studies of military history; and winning recognition for almost unique
  insight and thoroughness in that direction; though I believe that when he
  came to embody the results in those extraordinary volumes recording the
  battles of our civil war; he retired from the law in some measure。  He
  knew these battles more accurately than the generals who fought them; and
  he was of a like proficiency in the European wars from the time of
  Napoleon down to our own time。  I have heard a story; which I cannot
  vouch for; that when foreknowledge of his afliiction; at the outbreak of
  our civil war; forbade him to be a soldier; he became a student of
  soldiership; and wreaked in that sort the passion of his most gallant
  spirit。  But whether this was true or not; it is certain that he pursued
  the study with a devotion which never blinded him to the atrocity of war。
  Some wars he could excuse and even justify; but for any war that seemed
  wanton or aggressive; he had only abhorrence。
  The last summer of a score that I had known him; we sat on the veranda of
  his cottage at York Harbor; and looked out over the moonlit sea; and he
  talked of the high and true things; with the inextinguishable zest for
  the inquiry which I always found in him; though he was then feeling the
  approaches of the malady which was so soon to end all groping in these
  shadows for him。  He must have faced the fact with the same courage and
  the same trust with which he faced all facts。  From the first I found him
  a deeply religious man; not only in the ecclesiastical sense; but in the
  more mystical meanings of the word; and he kept his faith as he kept his
  youth to the last。  Every one who knew him; knows how young he was in
  heart; and how he liked to have those that were young in years about him。
  He wished to have his house in Boston; as well as his cottage at York;
  full of young men and young girls; whose joy of life he made his own; and
  whose society he preferred to his contemporaries'。  One could not blame
  him for that; or for seeking the sun; wherever he could; but it would be
  a false notion of him to suppose that his sympathies were solely or
  chiefly with the happy。  In every sort; as I knew him; he was fine and
  good。  The word is not worthy of him; after some of its uses and
  associations; but if it were unsmutched by these; and whitened to its
  primitive significance; I should say he was one of the most perfect
  gentlemen I ever knew。
  End