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Not the mother he had learned to dream of as a boy, when some faint memory of her fair face was still with him; not the tender and gentle mother who, if she had lived, would have been dearest on earth to him, and whose untimely death had lent her something heavenly and brightly mysterious; not the mother of whom his father had often told him, who from her place of peace looked down, perhaps, and smiled when he did well, or was pained when he did wrong; not the mother who, in his sleep, seemed to walk beside him when he was a child, robed in white, holding him by the hand and pointing heavenwards, like the picture of the Guardian Angel so common in his native country; not that mother who was to him the embodiment of all that was pure and lovely, and saintly and kind; not that sweet mother who for nearly forty years had held her secret place in the strange labyrinths of the lonely student's heart, to whose angelic figure he had often turned for consolation when weary with the aimlessness of deep study that led to nothing, or when satiated with all the useless, pleasureless pleasure which money could give and which there was no one to forbid.
He was the mayor of one of those dreary New England mill towns in northern Massachusetts a bleak, pleasureless realm of about forty thousand, where, from the time he was born until he finally left at the age of thirty-six to seek his fortune elsewhere, he had resided without change.
This means that our activities are largely wasted in pleasureless ways; that, being more tired than we should be, we lose much time in needed rest; moreover, that being, all of us more or less, slaves to the drudgery of need or fashion, we set a positive value on that negative good called freedom, even as the pause between pain takes, in some cases, the character of pleasure.
Yet even here, after some pleasureless days spent in vain endeavours to shake off these vulgar associations, I was to experience one of the sweetest surprises and delights of my life. The church of this village-like town is one of its chief attractions; it is a very old and stately building, and its perpendicular tower, nearly a hundred feet high, is one of the noblest in England.
The change from a life of fevered, though most miserable, excitement, to one of dull, pleasureless, and utterly uninteresting propriety, is one that can hardly be made without the assistance of binding control. Could she have been sent to the mill, and made subject to her mother's softness as well as to her mother's care, there might have been room for confident hope.
Wonderful industry strange, fruitless, pleasureless toil? Must not the very devil feel a soft emotion to see his disinterested and laborious service?
We no longer pierced them with the arrows of satire and wit because they accepted lower standards and found pleasure in things essentially pleasureless; they had not lived in Arden, and why should we berate them for not possessing that which had never been within their reach? We saw that upon those whom an inscrutable fate has led through the paths of Arden a great and noble duty is laid.
From being in a mood of simmering satisfaction with her lot she passed to the phase of being generously commiserating for those thousands around her whose lives and circumstances were dull, cheap, pleasureless, and empty.
Frau Vogel could not forgive her that. It was almost as though Sabine did it on purpose, on purpose, ironically, to set at naught by her conduct the great traditions, the true principles, the savorless duty, the pleasureless labor, the restlessness, the noise, the quarrels, the mooning ways, the healthy pessimism which was the motive power of the Euler family, as it is that of all respectable persons, and made their life a foretaste of purgatory.
She endured insult, even blows; she felt caresses bestowed only in pity; she was a misplaced object in that community of unmarried warriors, upon which wandering Zaporozhe cast a colouring of its own. Her pleasureless youth flitted by; her ripe cheeks and bosom withered away unkissed and became covered with premature wrinkles.
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