-possessed, happy, and at
home, his house is deep-founded, indefinitely large and interesting, the
roof and dome buoyant as the sky. Under the humblest roof, the commonest
person in plain clothes sits there massive, cheerful, yet formidable,
like the Egyptian colossi.

Neither Aristotle, nor Leibnitz, nor Junius, nor Champollion has set
down the grammar-rules of this dialect, older than Sanscrit; but they
who cannot yet read English, can read this. Men take each other's
measure when they meet for the first time,--and every time they meet.
How do they get this rapid knowledge, even before they speak, of each
other's power and dispositions? One would say, that the persuasion of
their speech is not in what they say,--or, that men do not convince by
their argument,--but by their personality, by who they are, and what
they said and did heretofore. A man already strong is listened to, and
everything he says is applauded. Another opposes him with sound
argument, but the argument is scouted, until by-and-by it gets into the
mind of some weighty person; then it begins to tell on the community.

Self-reliance is the basis of behavior, as it is the guaranty that the
powers are not squandered in too much demonstration. In this country,
where school education is universal, we have a superficial culture, and
a profusion of reading and writing and expression. We parade our
nobilities in poems and orations, instead of working them up into
happiness. There is a whisper out of the ages to him who can understand
it,--"Whatever is known to thyself alone, has always very great value."
There is some reason to believe, that, when a man does not write his
poetry, it escapes by other vents through him, instead of the one vent
of writing; clings to his form and manners, whilst poets have often
nothing poetical about them except their verses. Jacobi said that, "when
a man has fully expressed his thought, he has somewhat less possession
of it." One would say, the rule is,--What a man is irresistibly urged to
say, helps him and us. In explaining his thought to others, he explains
it to himself: but when he opens it for show, it corrupts him.

Society is the stage on which manners are shown; novels are their
literature. Novels are the journal or record of manners; and the new
importance of these books derives from the fact, that the novelist
begins to penetrate the surface, and treats this part of life more
worthily. The novels used to be all alik