it, the next best is understanding it, and a long way after this is the money it may be made to earn. Of all inventions, the best thing is the ingenuity in them; and what is noblest in all discoveries is the mind with which they were made out. It is the soul that is the greatness of all human achievements. And these great achievements I love to hear of, for they make me feel my own greatness, and not presumptuously; for in other men's crimes I acknowledge my own evil liabilities. Human nature is dear to me in every form of it, in what is told of great kings, and in what I have myself learned from a beggarwoman, in the prattle of infancy, in the eager movements of youth, and in the solemn words of a man ripe and ready for death.

MARHAM.

It is because you either have been, or may possibly be, in some such situations yourself.

AUBIN.

But then I love human nature as it is to be read of in Homer's Iliad, in the temples, on the obelisks, and in the tombs of Egypt, in the apocryphal books of the Jews, in the Arabian Nights' Entertainments, in Snorro Sturleson's Sagas of the Norsemen, in the Chronicles of Jocelin of Brakelond, in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, and in Catlin's account of the American Indians. Not exactly as Paul meant, yet quite truly, all

over the world, and in all ages, we all have been made to drink into one spirit. If a man is a man in head and heart, and has been so in action besides, then he has an interest in all human things, and a something of right in them. What Beaumont and Fletcher make a man say in one of their plays, I myself feel, and

When any falls from virtue, I am distract,

I have an interest in 't.

It is but little I have been, or have had an opportunity of being. Yet when I think of good and great men, sometimes there comes over my mind a strange feeling of fellowship in glory with them. In me, and in them, there is one soul, and I have not lived altogether unworthily of it; and so in them I recognize my own nature as it is, or else as it may be made by prayer and the Divine grace. The end of Leonidas, and Stephen's martyrdom, are mirrors in which my soul sees her own devotedness. I can conceive, and partly I have lived, the pains and perseverance in which the pyramids of Egypt were built; and so, in some sense, they are monuments of the laboriousness of my nature. It is my own way of thinking and feeling that is in the better parts of the writings of Fénelon and George Fox; and so from those books is reflected the character of my mind. The zeal of St. Paul, Milton's patriotism, - Pascal's purity, - Galileo's sight into

the stars,

- the exactness of Cuvier's account of

creatures that perished from this earth more than a myriad years ago, what King Alfred was,

what Washington was, the mind of the Pilgrim Fathers, -O, what a cloud of witnesses these are! And how they testify the greatness of the human soul! With thoughts like these, the more my soul warms, the more immortal it feels, and rightly; for one way I am every thing that I love; and, indeed, altogether I am, almost.

MARHAM.

O, if only you could have health and strength!

AUBIN.

And then, dear uncle, I should very likely be nothing remarkable. Because, for one famous man, there are a thousand, ay, and ten thousand, deservers. Excellence is commoner than is thought, the essence of it is; only it does not get expressed, sometimes out of modesty, sometimes for want of opportunity, but oftenest for want of some little knack.

MARHAM.

You think so? But is not that as though some better souls had been made for impossible purposes?

AUBIN.

Purposes impossible in this world, and therefore so highly presumptive of another world. Often, for one hero, there are a hundred heroic

spirits, only they do not get into action. Because a hero needs five hundred square miles for a stage; while that space of land is not meant to be only the theatre for one man to act in, but the native country of ten million people. And so out of a hundred persons who are heroical by nature, one is allowed to be so in action; and the rest, through sympathy with him, feel themselves, and know themselves, and grow stronger. And every thrill of their souls is prophetic of the high use which God will make of them all hereafter.

MARHAM.

That is well argued, Oliver.

AUBIN.

If a man does earnestly what duty he has to do, then he is any and every character that he truly loves, he is Howard, the philanthropist, and Sidney, the patriot, and John, the Apostle.

You cannot mean

MARHAM.

AUBIN.

That he is those men, or what they really were; but I mean that` he is, and is truly, what they seem to him. As soon as I do thoroughly understand and feel Bacon's Essays, they may be regarded as utterances, no! every thing but that. They may then stand as the measure of my wisdom, no! not that; but they may be regarded as the manner in which I should myself

think, if only some little change, some slight freedom, were wrought within my soul. How grand that engraving from Michael Angelo is! And, O, what purity, what unearthly beauty, what heavenly-mindedness, there is in that Madonna of Correggio! But what I see in these pictures is what I feel in my own mind; and what I feel while looking at them is what I am capable of feeling in other things, —in duty, in virtuous aspirations, in my prayers to God, and in my hymns to him, and in my thoughts of an hereafter.

Oliver, I think the

in the world than he

I mean.

MARHAM.

artist will be more availing has ever been; religiously,

AUBIN.

And so I think, uncle. But I do not think the Puritans were wrong in their age for dashing out painted windows, and removing pictures from churches, and pulling down organs, and unfrocking the choristers, and white-washing gilded ornaments; because it is possible a worshipper in a church may be the worse for such things as these ; and, indeed, he will be greatly the worse for them, unless he is earnest and enlightened. I think, uncle, I have noticed, that, wherever there is a great taste for music or painting, character is the better, or else very much the worse for it. One or two persons I know, the tone of whose minds