"Haggard, H Rider- When the World Shook" - читать интересную книгу автора (Haggard H. Rider)

false lines, quite nugatory. These will trust to themselves and
their own intelligence and not be content to spring from the
cliffs of human experience into the everlasting arms of that
Infinite which are stretched out to receive them and to give them
rest and the keys of knowledge. When will man learn what was
taught to him of old, that faith is the only plank wherewith he
can float upon this sea and that his miserable works avail him
nothing; also that it is a plank made of many sorts of wood,
perhaps to suit our different weights?

So to be honest, in a sense I believe myself to be my father's
superior, and I know that he agreed with me. Perhaps this is
owing to the blood of my Scotch mother which mixed well with his
own; perhaps because the essential spirit given to me, though
cast in his mould, was in fact quite different--or of another
alloy. Do we, I wonder, really understand that there are millions
and billions of these alloys, so many indeed that Nature, or
whatever is behind Nature, never uses the same twice over? That
is why no two human beings are or ever will be quite identical.
Their flesh, the body of their humiliation, is identical in all,
any chemist will prove it to you, but that which animates the
flesh is distinct and different because it comes from the home of
that infinite variety which is necessary to the ultimate
evolution of the good and bad that we symbolise as heaven and
hell.

Further, I had and to a certain extent still have another
advantage over my father, which certainly came to me from my
mother, who was, as I judge from all descriptions and such
likenesses as remain of her, an extremely handsome woman. I was
born much better looking. He was small and dark, a little man
with deep-set eyes and beetling brows. I am also dark, but tall
above the average, and well made. I do not know that I need say
more about my personal appearance, to me not a very attractive
subject, but the fact remains that they called me "handsome
Humphrey" at the University, and I was the captain of my college
boat and won many prizes at athletic sports when I had time to
train for them.

Until I went up to Oxford my father educated me, partly because
he knew that he could do it better than anyone else, and partly
to save school expenses. The experiment was very successful, as my
love of all outdoor sports and of any small hazardous adventure
that came to my hand, also of associating with fisherfolk whom
the dangers of the deep make men among men, saved me from
becoming a milksop. For the rest I learned more from my father,
whom I always desired to please because I loved him, than I
should have done at the best and most costly of schools. This was
shown when at last I went to college with a scholarship, for
there I did very well indeed, as search would still reveal.