legy calls it. Fire can stand any wind, but is
easily blown out, and then come smouldering and smoke, and profitless,
slow combustion without the cheerful blaze which sheds light all
round it. The one Reader's hand may shelter the flame; the one blessed
ministering spirit with the vessel of oil may keep it bright in spite of
the stream of cold water on the other side doing its best to put it out.

I suppose, if any writer, of any distinguishable individuality, could
look into the hearts of all his readers, he might very probably find one
in his parish of a thousand or a million who honestly preferred him
to any other of his kind. I have no doubt we have each one of us,
somewhere, our exact facsimile, so like us in all things except the
accidents of condition, that we should love each other like a pair
of twins, if our natures could once fairly meet. I know I have my
counterpart in some State of this Union. I feel sure that there is an
Englishman somewhere precisely like myself. (I hope he does not drop his
h's, for it does not seem to me possible that the Royal Dane could have
remained faithful to his love for Ophelia, if she had addressed him as
'Amlet.) There is also a certain Monsieur, to me at this moment unknown,
and likewise a Herr Von Something, each of whom is essentially my
double. An Arab is at this moment eating dates, a mandarin is
just sipping his tea, and a South-Sea-Islander (with undeveloped
possibilities) drinking the milk of a cocoa-nut, each one of whom, if
he had been born in the gambrel-roofed house, and cultivated my little
sand-patch, and grown up in "the study" from the height of Walton's
Polyglot Bible to that of the shelf which held the Elzevir Tacitus and
Casaubon's Polybius, with all the complex influences about him that
surrounded me, would have been so nearly what I am that I should have
loved him like a brother,--always provided that I did not hate him for
his resemblance to me, on the same principle as that which makes bodies
in the same electric condition repel each other.

For, perhaps after all, my One Reader is quite as likely to be not
the person most resembling myself, but the one to whom my nature is
complementary. Just as a particular soil wants some one element
to fertilize it, just as the body in some conditions has a kind of
famine--for one special food, so the mind has its wants, which do not
always call for what is best, but which know themselves and are as
peremptory as the