g striking. The result was that his sermons became
eminently classical and elegant; only they became impossible to attend
to, and impossible to remember; and when you heard the good man preach,
you sighed for the rough and striking heartiness of former days. And
we have all heard of such a thing as taste refined to that painful
sensitiveness, that it became a source of torment,--that is, unfitted
for common enjoyments and even for common duties. There was once a great
man, let us say at Melipotamus, who never went to church. A clergyman
once, in speaking to a friend of the great man, lamented that the great
man set so bad an example before his humbler neighbors. "How _can_ that
man go to church?" was the reply; "his taste, and his entire critical
faculty, are sharpened, to that degree, that, in listening to any
ordinary preacher, he feels outraged and shocked at every fourth
sentence he hears, by its inelegance or its want of logic; and the
entire sermon torments him by its unsymmetrical structure, its want of
perspective in the presentment of details, and its general literary
badness." I quite believe that there was a moderate proportion of truth
in the excuse thus urged; and you will probably judge that it would have
been better, had the great man's mind not been brought to so painful a
polish.

The mention of dried-up old gentlemen reminds one of a question which
has sometimes perplexed me. Is it Vealy to feel or to show keen emotion?
Is it a precious result and indication of the maturity of the human mind
to look as if you felt nothing at all? I have often looked with wonder,
and with a moderate amount of veneration, at a few old gentlemen whom I
know well, who are leading members of a certain legislative and judicial
council held in great respect in a country of which no more need be
said. I have beheld these old gentlemen sitting apparently quite
unmoved, when discussions were going on in which I knew they felt a very
deep interest, and when the tide of debate was setting strongly against
their peculiar views. There they sat, impassive as a Red Indian at the
stake. I think of a certain man who, while a smart speech on the other
side is being made, retains a countenance expressing actually nothing;
he looks as if he heard nothing, felt nothing, cared for nothing. But
when the other man sits down, he rises to reply. He speaks slowly at
first, but every weighty word goes home and tells: he gathers warmth and
rapidity