a window into heaven momentarily
opened and then closed. I have myself no idea that she was a countess
incognito, or that she had descended from any greater heights than those
where Mandeville saw her, but I have always regretted that she went her
way so mysteriously and left no glow, and that we shall wear out the
remainder of our days without her society. I have looked for her name,
but always in vain, among the attendants at the rights-conventions,
in the list of those good Americans presented at court, among those
skeleton names that appear as the remains of beauty in the morning
journals after a ball to the wandering prince, in the reports of railway
collisions and steamboat explosions. No news comes of her. And so
imperfect are our means of communication in this world that, for
anything we know, she may have left it long ago by some private way.

IV

The lasting regret that we cannot know more of the bright, sincere, and
genuine people of the world is increased by the fact that they are all
different from each other. Was it not Madame de Sevigne who said she
had loved several different women for several different qualities? Every
real person--for there are persons as there are fruits that have no
distinguishing flavor, mere gooseberries--has a distinct quality, and
the finding it is always like the discovery of a new island to the
voyager. The physical world we shall exhaust some day, having a written
description of every foot of it to which we can turn; but we shall never
get the different qualities of people into a biographical dictionary,
and the making acquaintance with a human being will never cease to be an
exciting experiment. We cannot even classify men so as to aid us much in
our estimate of them. The efforts in this direction are ingenious, but
unsatisfactory. If I hear that a man is lymphatic or nervous-sanguine, I
cannot tell therefrom whether I shall like and trust him. He may produce
a phrenological chart showing that his knobby head is the home of all
the virtues, and that the vicious tendencies are represented by holes
in his cranium, and yet I cannot be sure that he will not be as
disagreeable as if phrenology had not been invented. I feel sometimes
that phrenology is the refuge of mediocrity. Its charts are almost as
misleading concerning character as photographs. And photography may be
described as the art which enables commonplace mediocrity to look like
genius. The heavy-jowled man wi