ities, that more
catholic and humane relations may appear. The saint and poet seek
privacy to ends the most public and universal: and it is the secret of
culture, to interest the man more in his public than in his private
quality. Here is a new poem, which elicits a good many comments in
the journals and in conversation. From these it is easy, at last, to
eliminate the verdict which readers passed upon it; and that is, in the
main, unfavorable. The poet, as a craftsman, is interested only in the
praise accorded to him, and not in the censure, though it be just; and
the poor little poet hearkens only to that, and rejects the censure, as
proving incapacity in the critic. But the poet _cultivated_ becomes a
stockholder in both companies,--say Mr. Curfew,--in the Curfew stock,
and in the _humanity_ stock; and, in the last, exults as much in the
demonstration of the unsoundness of Curfew as his interest in the former
gives him pleasure in the currency of Curfew. For the depreciation of
his Curfew stock only shows the immense values of the humanity stock.
As soon as he sides with his critic against himself, with joy, he is a
cultivated man.

We must have an intellectual quality in all property and in all action,
or they are nought. I must have children, I must have events, I must
have a social state and history, or my thinking and speaking want body
or basis. But to give these accessories any value, I must know them as
contingent and rather showy possessions, which pass for more to the
people than to me. We see this abstraction in scholars, as a matter
of course: but what a charm it adds when observed in practical men!
Bonaparte, like Caesar, was intellectual, and could look at every object
for itself, without affection. Though an egotist _a l'outrance_, he
could criticize a play, a building, a character, on universal grounds,
and give a just opinion. A man known to us only as a celebrity in
politics or in trade gains largely in our esteem, if we discover that he
has some intellectual taste or skill: as when we learn of Lord Fairfax,
the Long Parliament's general, his passion for antiquarian studies; or
of the French regicide Carnot, his sublime genius in mathematics; or of
a living banker, his success in poetry; or of a partisan journalist,
his devotion to ornithology. So, if, in travelling in the dreary
wildernesses of Arkansas or Texas, we should observe on the next seat a
man reading Horace, or Martial, or Calderon, we sh