of our waking
knowledge. The visions of the night bear some proportion to the visions
of the day. Hideous dreams are exaggerations of the sins of the day. We
see our evil affections embodied in bad physiognomies. On the Alps the
traveller sometimes beholds his own shadow magnified to a giant, so that
every gesture of his hand is terrific. "My children," said an old man
to his boys scared by a figure in the dark entry, "my children, you
will never see any thing worse than yourselves." As in dreams, so in
the scarcely less fluid events of the world every man sees himself in
colossal, without knowing that it is himself. The good, compared to the
evil which he sees, is as his own good to his own evil. Every quality of
his mind is magnified in some one acquaintance, and every emotion of
his heart in some one. He is like a quincunx of trees, which counts
five,--east, west, north, or south; or an initial, medial, and terminal
acrostic. And why not? He cleaves to one person and avoids another,
according to their likeness or unlikeness to himself, truly seeking
himself in his associates and moreover in his trade and habits and
gestures and meats and drinks, and comes at last to be faithfully
represented by every view you take of his circumstances.

He may read what he writes. What can we see or acquire but what we are?
You have observed a skilful man reading Virgil. Well, that author is a
thousand books to a thousand persons. Take the book into your two
hands and read your eyes out, you will never find what I find. If any
ingenious reader would have a monopoly of the wisdom or delight he gets,
he is as secure now the book is Englished, as if it were imprisoned in
the Pelews' tongue. It is with a good book as it is with good company.
Introduce a base person among gentlemen, it is all to no purpose; he
is not their fellow. Every society protects itself. The company is
perfectly safe, and he is not one of them, though his body is in the
room.

What avails it to fight with the eternal laws of mind, which adjust the
relation of all persons to each other by the mathematical measure of
their havings and beings? Gertrude is enamored of Guy; how high, how
aristocratic, how Roman his mien and manners! to live with him were life
indeed, and no purchase is too great; and heaven and earth are moved
to that end. Well, Gertrude has Guy; but what now avails how high, how
aristocratic, how Roman his mien and manners, if his heart and aims are