e company by declaring
that he would rather have seen Judas Iscariot than any other person
who had lived on the earth. For myself, I would rather have seen Lamb
himself once, than to have lived with Judas. Herbert, to my great
delight, has not changed; I should know him anywhere,--the same serious,
contemplative face, with lurking humor at the corners of the mouth,--the
same cheery laugh and clear, distinct enunciation as of old. There is
nothing so winning as a good voice. To see Herbert again, unchanged
in all outward essentials, is not only gratifying, but valuable as a
testimony to nature's success in holding on to a personal identity,
through the entire change of matter that has been constantly taking
place for so many years. I know very well there is here no part of the
Herbert whose hand I had shaken at the Commencement parting; but it is
an astonishing reproduction of him,--a material likeness; and now for
the spiritual.

Such a wide chance for divergence in the spiritual. It has been such
a busy world for twenty years. So many things have been torn up by the
roots again that were settled when we left college. There were to be no
more wars; democracy was democracy, and progress, the differentiation
of the individual, was a mere question of clothes; if you want to be
different, go to your tailor; nobody had demonstrated that there is
a man-soul and a woman-soul, and that each is in reality only a
half-soul,--putting the race, so to speak, upon the half-shell. The
social oyster being opened, there appears to be two shells and only one
oyster; who shall have it? So many new canons of taste, of criticism,
of morality have been set up; there has been such a resurrection of
historical reputations for new judgment, and there have been so many
discoveries, geographical, archaeological, geological, biological, that
the earth is not at all what it was supposed to be; and our philosophers
are much more anxious to ascertain where we came from than whither we
are going. In this whirl and turmoil of new ideas, nature, which has
only the single end of maintaining the physical identity in the body,
works on undisturbed, replacing particle for particle, and preserving
the likeness more skillfully than a mosaic artist in the Vatican; she
has not even her materials sorted and labeled, as the Roman artist has
his thousands of bits of color; and man is all the while doing his
best to confuse the process, by changing his climate, his