it; so is the advice of the police that you shall
"circuler" in the street; so is the request, posted up, that you shall
not, in the churches.

So are the serious and ordinary phrases, "maison nuptiale," "maison
mortuaire," and the still more serious "repos dominical," "oraison
dominicale." There is no majesty in such words. The unsuspicious
gravity with which they are spoken broadcast is not to be wondered at,
the language offering no relief of contrast; and what is much to the
credit of the comic sensibility of literature is the fact that, through
this general unconsciousness, the ridicule of a thousand authors of
comedy perceives the fun, and singles out the familiar thing, and compels
that most elaborate dulness to amuse us. _Us_, above all, by virtue of
the custom of counterchange here set forth.

Who shall say whether, by operation of the same exchange, the English
poets that so persist in France may not reveal something within the
English language--one would be somewhat loth to think so--reserved to the
French reader peculiarly? Byron to the multitude, Edgar Poe to the
select? Then would some of the mysteries of French reading of English be
explained otherwise than by the plainer explanation that has hitherto
satisfied our haughty curiosity. The taste for rhetoric seemed to
account for Byron, and the desire of the rhetorician to claim a taste for
poetry seemed to account for Poe. But, after all, _patatras_! Who can
say?

RAIN

Not excepting the falling stars--for they are far less sudden--there is
nothing in nature that so outstrips our unready eyes as the familiar
rain. The rods that thinly stripe our landscape, long shafts from the
clouds, if we had but agility to make the arrowy downward journey with
them by the glancing of our eyes, would be infinitely separate, units, an
innumerable flight of single things, and the simple movement of intricate
points.

The long stroke of the raindrop, which is the drop and its path at once,
being our impression of a shower, shows us how certainly our impression
is the effect of the lagging, and not of the haste, of our senses. What
we are apt to call our quick impression is rather our sensibly tardy,
unprepared, surprised, outrun, lightly bewildered sense of things that
flash and fall, wink, and are overpast and renewed, while the gentle eyes
of man hesitate and mingle the beginning with the close. These inexpert
eyes, delicately baffled, detain for