it is only when
these fair qualities shine upon him from a girl's face that he is
smitten by transport--only then is he truly happy. In that junction of
hearts, in that ecstasy of mutual admiration and delight, the finest
epithalamium ever writ by poet is hardly worthy of the occasion. The
countryman purchases oranges at a fair for his little ones; and when he
brings them home in the evening, and watches his chubby urchins,
sitting up among the bed-clothes, peel and devour the fruit, he is for
the time-being richer than if he drew the rental of the orange-groves
of Seville. To eat an orange himself is nothing; to see _them_ eat it
is a pleasure worth the price of the fruit a thousand times over.
There is no happiness in the world in which love does not enter; and
love is but the discovery of ourselves in others, and the delight in
the recognition. Apart from others no man can make his happiness; just
as, apart from a mirror of one kind or another, no man can become
acquainted with his own lineaments.

The accomplishment of a man is the light by which we are enabled to
discover the limits of his personality. Every man brings into the
world with him a certain amount of pith and force, and to that pith or
force his amount of accomplishment is exactly proportioned. It is in
this way that every spoken word, every action of a man, becomes
biographical. Everything a man says or does is in consistency with
himself; and it is by looking back on his sayings and doings that we
arrive at the truth concerning him. A man is one; and every outcome of
him has a family resemblance. Goldsmith did _not_ "write like an angel
and talk like poor Poll," as we may in part discern from Boswell's
"Johnson." Strange, indeed, if a man talked continually the sheerest
nonsense, and wrote continually the gracefulest humours; if a man was
lame on the street, and the finest dancer in the ball-room. To
describe a character by antithesis is like painting a portrait in black
and white--all the curious intermixtures and gradations of colour are
lost. The accomplishment of a human being is measured by his strength,
or by his nice tact in using his strength. The distance to which your
gun, whether rifled or smooth-bored, will carry its shot, depends upon
the force of its charge. A runner's speed and endurance depends upon
his depth of chest and elasticity of limb. If a poet's lines lack
harmony, it instructs us that there is a certain lack of