happy, and making the commonest offices beautiful, by the energy and heart with which she does them, and seeing this, we admire and love her and them, and say, ‘Lo! a genuine creature of the fair earth, not dissipated, or too early ripened by books, philosophy, religion, society, or care!' insinuating a treachery and contempt for all we had so long loved and wrought in ourselves and others.

F we could have any security against

No fixed
Rule
Binds

be holden to his words, and the hearer who is ready to sell all and join the crusade, could have any certificate that to-morrow his prophet shall not unsay his testimony ! But the truth sits veiled there on the bench, and never interposes an adamantine syllable; and the most sincere and revolutionary doctrine, put as if the ark of God were carried forward some furlongs, and planted there for the succour of the world, shall in a few weeks be coldly set aside by the same speaker, as morbid; “I thought I was right, but I was not '—and the same immeasurable credulity demanded for new audacities. If we were not of all opinions! if we did not in any moment shift the platform on which we stand, and look and speak from another! if there could be any regulation, any 'one-hour-rule,' that a man should never leave his point of view, without sound of trumpet! I am always insincere, as always knowing there are other moods.

WE

Man Believes by Nature

E are natural believers. Truth, or the

connection between cause and effect, alone interests us. We are persuaded that a thread runs through all things: all worlds are strung on it, as beads: and men, and events, and life, come to us, only because of that thread: they pass and repass, only that we may know the direction and continuity of that line. A book or statement which goes to show that there is no line, but random and chaos, a calamity out of nothing, a prosperity and no

account of it, a hero born from a fool, a fool from a hero-dispirits us.

Seen or unseen, we believe the tie exists. Talent makes counterfeit ties; genius finds the real ones.

Representative Men.

Skepticism

KEPTICISM is the attitude assumed

by the student in relation to the particulars which society adores, but which he sees to be reverent only in their tendency and spirit. The ground occupied by the skeptic is the vestibule of the temple.

Representative Men.

Blindness to Defects

NA

ATURE never spares the opium or

nepenthe; but wherever she mars her creature with some deformity or defect, lays her poppies plentifully on the bruise, and the sufferer goes joyfully through life, ignorant of the ruin, and incapable of seeing it, though all the world point their finger at it every day. The worthless and offensive members of society, whose existence is a social pest, invariably think themselves the most ill-used people alive, and never get over their astonishment at the ingratitude and selfishness of their contemporaries.

Representative Men.

BUT

No One is Sane

a

UT the craft with which the world is

made, runs also into the mind and character of men. No man is quite sane; each has a vein of folly in his composition,

slight determination of blood to the head, to make sure of holding him hard to some one point which nature had taken to heart. Great causes are never tried on their merits; but the cause is reduced to particulars to suit the size of the partisans, and the contention is ever hottest on minor matters. Not less remarkable is the overfaith of each man in the importance of what he has to

do or say.

The

HE poet, the prophet, has a higher
value for what he utters than

any hearer, and therefore it gets spoken. The

THE

Poet and the Prophet man

life bilica

some

to ac

ence.

strong, self-complacent Luther declares with
an emphasis, not to be mistaken, that 'God
Himself cannot do without wise men.'
Jacob Behmen and George Fox betray
their egotism in the pertinacity of their
controversial tracts, and James Naylor once
suffered himself to be worshipped as the
Christ. Each prophet comes presently to
identify himself with his thought, and to
esteem his hat and shoes sacred. However
this may discredit such persons with the
judicious, it helps them with the people,
as it gives heat, pungency, and publicity
to their words. A similar experience is not
infrequent in private life.

expo not L

T

satio the

atior

self. com of char

The
Youth-
ful
Diary

E

susp frier

ACH

young and ardent person writes a

diary, in which, when the hours of prayer
and penitence arrive, he inscribes his soul.
The pages thus written are, to him, burning

,
and fragrant: he reads them on his knees by
midnight and by the morning star: he wets
them with his tears: they are sacred; too
good for the world, and hardly yet to be
shown to the dearest friend. This is the