our books by their bindings, though
the true and essential characteristics lie inside. A man is known to his
dog by the smell--to his tailor by the coat--to his friend by the smile:
each of these know him, but how little, or how much, depends on the
dignity of the intelligence. That which is truly and indeed
characteristic of the man, is known only to God. One portrait of a man
may possess exact accuracy of feature, and no atom of expression; it may
be, to use the ordinary terms of admiration bestowed on such portraits
by those whom they please, "as like as it can stare." Everybody, down to
his cat, would know this. Another portrait may have neglected or
misrepresented the features, but may have given the flash of the eye,
and the peculiar radiance of the lip, seen on him only in his hours of
highest mental excitement. None but his friends would know this. Another
may have given none of his ordinary expressions, but one which he wore
in the most excited instant of his life, when all his secret passions
and all his highest powers were brought into play at once. None but
those who had then seen him might recognize _this_ as like. But which
would be the most truthful portrait of the _man_? The first gives the
accidents of body--the sport of climate, and food, and time--which
corruption inhabits, and the worm waits for. The second gives the stamp
of the soul upon the flesh; but it is the soul seen in the emotions
which it shares with many--which may not be characteristic of its
essence--the results of habit, and education, and accident--a gloze,
whether purposely worn or unconsciously assumed, perhaps totally
contrary to all that is rooted and real in the mind that it conceals.
The third has caught the trace of all that was most hidden and most
mighty, when all hypocrisy, and all habit, and all petty and passing
emotion--the ice, and the bank, and the foam of the immortal river--were
shivered, and broken, and swallowed up in the awakening of its inward
strength; when the call and claim of some divine motive had brought into
visible being those latent forces and feelings which the spirit's own
volition could not summon, nor its consciousness comprehend; which God
only knew, and God only could awaken, the depth and the mystery of its
peculiar and separating attributes. And so it is with external Nature:
she has a body and a soul like man; but her soul is the Deity. It is
possible to represent the body without the spirit; and th