The suspicion of hurt to the beautiful thing would break his heart.

He could more easily lie down and die for her than sympathize intelligently in her vague, delicious dreams, the aspirations, half agony, half rapture, which she cannot convey to his comprehension--yet which she feels that he ought to share.
Ah! the pathos and the pity--sometimes the godlike patience of that silent side of our dear John! Mrs.Whitney, writing of Richard Hathaway, tells us enough of it to beget in us infinite tolerance.
"Everything takes hold away down where I can't reach or help," says the poor fellow of his sensitive, poetical wife.

"She is all the time holding up her soul to me with a thorn in it." "He did not know that that was poetry and pathos.

It was a natural illustration out of his homely, gentle, compassionate life.

He knew how to help dumb things in their hurts.