, of course, that one of them had enjoyed
greater advantages than the other, but neither wrote from the point of
view which marks his caste or class. It was my habit to write to you,
and to him, exactly in the same tone, yet this was not felt to be
unsuitable by either.

Is it not that the love and pursuit of culture lead each of us out of
his class, and that class-views of any kind, whether of the aristocracy,
or of the middle class, or of the people, inevitably narrow the mind and
hinder it from receiving pure truth? Have you ever known any person who
lived habitually in the notions of a caste, high or low, without
incapacitating himself in a greater or less degree for breadth and
delicacy of perception? It seems to me that the largest and best minds,
although they have been born and nurtured in this caste or that, and may
continue to conform externally to its customs, always emancipate
themselves from it intellectually, and arrive at a sort of neutral
region, where the light is colorless, and clear, and equal, like plain
daylight out of doors. So soon as we attain the forgetfulness of self,
and become absorbed in our pursuits for their own sakes, the feeling of
caste drops off from us. It was not a mark of culture in Tycho Brahe,
but rather of the imperfections of his culture, that he felt so strongly
the difficulty of conciliating scientific pursuits with the obligations
of noble birth, and began his public discourses on astronomy by telling
his audience that the work was ill-suited to his social
position--hesitating, too, even about authorship from a dread of social
degradation. And to take an instance from the opposite extreme of human
society, Robert Burns betrayed the same imperfection of culture in his
dedication to the members of the Caledonian Hunt, when he spoke of his
"honest rusticity," and told the gentlefolks that he was "bred to the
plough, and independent." Both of these men had been unfavorably
situated for the highest culture, the one by the ignorance of his epoch
the other by the ignorance of his class; hence this uneasiness about
themselves and their social position. Shelley said of Byron, "The canker
of aristocracy wants to be cut out;" and he did not say this from the
point of view of a democrat, for Shelley was not precisely a democrat,
but from, the broadly human point of view, on which the finest
intellects like to take their stand. Shelley perceived that Byron's
aristocracy narrowed him, and