swaggering phrases, arbitrary dogmas, the generalized lies of proverbial cunning, which pass for truths by being lies comprehensive, are utterly worthless. They are the dregs and scourings of whatever in man is diabolical. Yet these are the true gods of millions who read tracts, newspapers, and novels. These are the invisible powers on which they rely, and on which they try to build their existence. For any thing I know, an old Egyptian who worshipped a cabbage, may have been less absurd in doing so than this or that sensitive and fantastic idolater of landscapes and size-coloured daubery, of tinsel talents and melo-dramatic greatness. An Irish peasant honouring with his mouth a glorified potato, would be performing a more reasonable service than that to which he often submits himself.
36.
From want of reverence may I and my children be preserved! But this prayer is not heartier than that which I offer for preservation from the reverence of hollow notions and smoky dreams, half felt to be lies, while we bow down to them. In singleness of heart to believe and do what highest we know—how few and simple are the words! yet their meaning fathoms the depths, and compasses the horizon of life.
37.
For a man of but half his years I knew well him, whom I shall here call Theophilus. The recollection of him is to me one of the most perfectly soothing and strengthening that life has afforded. When I first met him, some ten years before his departure, he was past his prime; but, at the last, he was only on the verge of old age, which never, indeed, seemed to have any place in his heart or his intelligence. As first seen—and, in these respects unchanged, until that hour which changed him altogether—he was tall, slender, and graceful, with a head which, in form and character, had a beauty at once magnanimous and delicate. The high heroic features and irresistible sweetness of look recalled Fenelon, but in a grander type, and Baxter polished into a purer stamp of gentlemanly softness. The marble clearness of the complexion, the lustre of the full grey eye, the high compact forehead, with its silvered hairs—but it is vain thus to enumerate particulars which, taken separately, do so little towards a portrait. Even the invisible characteristics, which words can better deal with, cannot thus be represented to others. For it avails scarce at all to speak of eloquence, learning, devotion, benignity, the fervid chastened glow of soul. All these are to a reader, not perhaps nothing, but very little of what they appeared as living in him. For that which gave its broadest worth and tenderest attractiveness to all, was a something peculiar and native in him alone, which I do not know how to indicate better than by the faint phrase—refinement of heart. It was not composed finish of manner, not philosophical subtlety of thought, but exquisiteness of beauty in the whole structure of his feelings and life, that gave to his demeanour and discourse an expression which no polish, no genius, could have either imparted or compensated.
There was in him a faint flush of Irish nature, a strong tone of an older and more elaborate school of courtesy than prevails now; the simplicity of a recluse student, the singularity of a mystical idealist, the freshness of a lover of all beauty and wisdom, whom no excess in intellectual indulgence had ever wearied of thought. But all these may be found, though not in common men, yet in those far colder and far coarser than he. Add, that there was the vivid life of human sympathies, which duty always guided and selfishness never confined. Yet even this is not the man. His distinct personality seemed rather to consist in the unceasing continuity of generous and upward feeling, to which the graceful, the becoming, the right, was not added as a qualification, or measure, but belonged to it, inhered in it, as its vital spirit.
His conversation was suitable to these characteristics,—flowing in a full stream of emotion and mild wisdom, and lambent faith, with a reserve and deference towards those opinions of others on which they set any value, such as could hardly have been surpassed had his associates been a circle of sovereigns and he their only courtier. Thus the mellow cordiality of his soul seemed to reconcile to him even those whose harsh intellectual bigotry armed itself the most surely against all theoretical dissent from them. It was
