nmity?
and if you choose to write your lingering affections upon stones, wreak
also your delayed anger upon clay. This would be just, and, in the last
case, little as you think it, generous. The true baseness is in the
bitter reverse--the strange iniquity of our folly. Is a man to be
praised, honored, pleaded for? It might do harm to praise or plead for
him while he lived. Wait till he is dead. Is he to be maligned,
dishonored, and discomforted? See that you do it while he is alive. It
would be too ungenerous to slander him when he could feel malice no
more; too contemptible to try to hurt him when he was past anguish. Make
yourselves busy, ye unjust, ye lying, ye hungry for pain! Death is near.
This is your hour, and the power of darkness. Wait, ye just, ye
merciful, ye faithful in love! Wait but for a little while, for this is
not your rest.

"Well, but," it is still answered, "is it not, indeed, ungenerous to
speak ill of the dead, since they cannot defend themselves?"

Why should they? If you speak ill of them falsely, it concerns you, not
them. Those lies of thine will "hurt a man as thou art," assuredly they
will hurt thyself; but that clay, or the delivered soul of it, in no
wise. Ajacean shield, seven-folded, never stayed lance-thrust as that
turf will, with daisies pied. What you say of those quiet ones is wholly
and utterly the world's affair and yours. The lie will, indeed, cost its
proper price and work its appointed work; you may ruin living myriads by
it,--you may stop the progress of centuries by it,--you may have to pay
your own soul for it,--but as for ruffling one corner of the folded
shroud by it, think it not. The dead have none to defend them! Nay, they
have two defenders, strong enough for the need--God, and the worm.

II. ROCK CLEAVAGE.

I am well aware how insufficient, and, in some measure, how disputable,
the account given in the preceding chapters of the cleavages of the
slaty crystallines must appear to geologists. But I had several reasons,
good or bad as they may be, for treating the subject in such a manner.
The first was, that considering the science of the artist as eminently
the science of _aspects_ (see Vol. III. Chap. XVII. Sec. 43), I kept myself
in all my investigations of natural objects as much as possible in the
state of an uninformed spectator of the outside of things, receiving
simply what impressions the external phenomena first induce. For the
natural tendency of accura