e porous to thought and bibulous of the sea of light.

Converse with a mind that is grandly simple, and literature looks like
word-catching. The simplest utterances are worthiest to be written, yet
are they so cheap and so things of course, that in the infinite riches
of the soul it is like gathering a few pebbles off the ground, or
bottling a little air in a phial, when the whole earth and the whole
atmosphere are ours. Nothing can pass there, or make you one of the
circle, but the casting aside your trappings, and dealing man to man in
naked truth, plain confession, and omniscient affirmation.

Souls such as these treat you as gods would, walk as gods in the earth,
accepting without any admiration your wit, your bounty, your virtue
even,--say rather your act of duty, for your virtue they own as their
proper blood, royal as themselves, and over-royal, and the father of the
gods. But what rebuke their plain fraternal bearing casts on the mutual
flattery with which authors solace each other and wound themselves!
These flatter not. I do not wonder that these men go to see Cromwell and
Christina and Charles the Second and James the First and the Grand Turk.
For they are, in their own elevation, the fellows of kings, and must
feel the servile tone of conversation in the world. They must always be
a godsend to princes, for they confront them, a king to a king, without
ducking or concession, and give a high nature the refreshment and
satisfaction of resistance, of plain humanity, of even companionship and
of new ideas. They leave them wiser and superior men. Souls like these
make us feel that sincerity is more excellent than flattery. Deal so
plainly with man and woman as to constrain the utmost sincerity and
destroy all hope of trifling with you. It is the highest compliment you
can pay. Their "highest praising," said Milton, "is not flattery, and
their plainest advice is a kind of praising."

Ineffable is the union of man and God in every act of the soul. The
simplest person who in his integrity worships God, becomes God; yet for
ever and ever the influx of this better and universal self is new and
unsearchable. It inspires awe and astonishment. How dear, how soothing
to man, arises the idea of God, peopling the lonely place, effacing the
scars of our mistakes and disappointments! When we have broken our god
of tradition and ceased from our god of rhetoric, then may God fire the
heart with his presence. It is the doubling