lective and diffusive sympathy was in danger of paralyzing in him
that indignation against wrong and that selectness of fellowship which
are the conditions of moral force; and in the last few years of
confirmed manhood he had become so keenly aware of this that what he
most longed for was either some external event, or some inward light,
that would urge him into a definite line of action, and compress his
wandering energy. He was ceasing to care for knowledge--he had no
ambition for practice--unless they could both be gathered up into one
current with his emotions; and he dreaded, as if it were a
dwelling-place of lost souls, that dead anatomy of culture which turns
the universe into a mere ceaseless answer to queries, and knows, not
everything, but everything else about everything--as if one should be
ignorant of nothing concerning the scent of violets except the scent
itself for which one had no nostril. But how and whence was the needed
event to come?--the influence that would justify partiality, and make
him what he longed to be, yet was unable to make himself--an organic
part of social life, instead of roaming in it like a yearning
disembodied spirit, stirred with a vague social passion, but without
fixed local habitation to render fellowship real? To make a little
difference for the better was what he was not contented to live
without; but how to make it? It is one thing to see your road, another
to cut it. He found some of the fault in his birth and the way he had
been brought up, which had laid no special demands on him and had given
him no fixed relationship except one of a doubtful kind; but he did not
attempt to hide from himself that he had fallen into a meditative
numbness, and was gliding farther and farther from that life of
practically energetic sentiment which he would have proclaimed (if he
had been inclined to proclaim anything) to be the best of all life, and
for himself the only way worth living. He wanted some way of keeping
emotion and its progeny of sentiments--which make the savors of
life--substantial and strong in the face of a reflectiveness that
threatened to nullify all differences. To pound the objects of
sentiment into small dust, yet keep sentiment alive and active, was
something like the famous recipe for making cannon--to first take a
round hole and then enclose it with iron; whatever you do keeping fast
hold of your round hole. Yet how distinguish what our will may wisely
save in its c