ned harshly as
to his uses, he might be unable to render a better apology for his
existence than a flower might. The essay should be pure literature as
the poem is pure literature. The essayist wears a lance, but he cares
more for the sharpness of its point than for the pennon that flutters
on it, than for the banner of the captain under whom he serves. He
plays with death as Hamlet plays with Yorick's skull, and he reads the
morals--strangely stern, often, for such fragrant lodging--which are
folded up in the bosoms of roses. He has no pride, and is deficient in
a sense of the congruity and fitness of things. He lifts a pebble from
the ground, and puts it aside more carefully than any gem; and on a
nail in a cottage-door he will hang the mantle of his thought, heavily
brocaded with the gold of rhetoric. He finds his way into the Elysian
fields through portals the most shabby and commonplace.

The essayist plays with his subject, now whimsical, now in grave, now
in melancholy mood. He lies upon the idle grassy bank, like Jacques,
letting the world flow past him, and from this thing and the other he
extracts his mirth and his moralities. His main gift is an eye to
discover the suggestiveness of common things; to find a sermon in the
most unpromising texts. Beyond the vital hint, the first step, his
discourses are not beholden to their titles. Let him take up the most
trivial subject, and it will lead him away to the great questions over
which the serious imagination loves to brood,--fortune, mutability,
death,--just as inevitably as the runnel, trickling among the summer
hills, on which sheep are bleating, leads you to the sea; or as,
turning down the first street you come to in the city, you are led
finally, albeit by many an intricacy, out into the open country, with
its waste places and its woods, where you are lost in a sense of
strangeness and solitariness. The world is to the meditative man what
the mulberry plant is to the silkworm. The essay-writer has no lack of
subject-matter. He has the day that is passing over his head; and, if
unsatisfied with that, he has the world's six thousand years to
depasture his gay or serious humour upon. I idle away my time here,
and I am finding new subjects every hour. Everything I see or hear is
an essay in bud. The world is everywhere whispering essays, and one
need only be the world's amanuensis. The proverbial expression which
last evening the clown dropped a