ompass of some four hundred pages we have about one hundred
articles, most of which had previously appeared in weekly newspapers.
They embrace, of course, every variety of subject,--grave and gay,
practical and poetical. They are not such themes as come to a man
in silence and solitude, to be wrought out with deep and deliberate
conscientiousness; they are rather such as He around one in his outgoing
and his incoming, in the field and by the way-side, overlooked by the
preoccupied multitude, but abundantly patent to the few who will not
permit the memories or the hopes of life to thrust away its actualities,
and, once pointed out, full of interest and amusement even to the
absorbed and hitherto unconscious throngs. We have here no pale-browed,
far-sighted philosopher, but a ruddy-faced, high-spirited man,
cheerful-tempered, yet not _equilibrious_, susceptible to annoyance,
capable of wrathful outbursts, with eyes to see all sweet sights, ears
to hear all sweet sounds, and lips to sing their loveliness to others,
and also with eyes and ears and lips just as keen to distinguish and
just as hold to denounce the sights and sounds that are unlovely;--and
this man, with his ringing laugh and his springing step, walks cheerily
to and fro in his daily work, striking the rocks here and there by the
way-side with his bright steel hammer, eliciting a shower of sparks from
each, and then on to the next. It is not the serious business of his
life, but its casual and almost careless experiments. He does not wait
to watch effects. You may gather up the brushwood and build yourself
a fire, if you like. His part of the affair is but a touch and go,--
partly for love and partly for fun.

There are places where a severer taste, or perhaps only a more careful
revision, would have changed somewhat. At times an exuberance of spirits
carries him to the very verge of coarseness, but this is rare and
exceptional. The fabric may be slightly ravelled at the ends and
slightly rough at the selvedge, but in the main it is fine and smooth
and lustrous as well as strong. A coarse nature carefully clipped and
sheared and fashioned down to the commonplace of conventionality will
often exhibit a negative refinement, while a mind of real and subtile
delicacy, but of rugged and irrepressible individuality, will
occasionally shoot out irregular and uncouth branches. Yet between the
symmetry of the one and the spontaneity of the other the choice cannot
be do