r
from the defects and absurdities of his company, he cannot without
affectation deny to any set of men and women a sensibility to
extraordinary merit. The coarse and frivolous have an instinct of
superiority, if they have not a sympathy, and honor it in their blind
capricious way with sincere homage.

The fine young people despise life, but in me, and in such as with me
are free from dyspepsia, and to whom a day is a sound and solid good, it
is a great excess of politeness to look scornful and to cry for company.
I am grown by sympathy a little eager and sentimental, but leave me
alone and I should relish every hour and what it brought me, the potluck
of the day, as heartily as the oldest gossip in the bar-room. I am
thankful for small mercies. I compared notes with one of my friends who
expects everything of the universe and is disappointed when anything
is less than the best, and I found that I begin at the other extreme,
expecting nothing, and am always full of thanks for moderate goods. I
accept the clangor and jangle of contrary tendencies. I find my account
in sots and bores also. They give a reality to the circumjacent picture
which such a vanishing meteorous appearance can ill spare. In the
morning I awake and find the old world, wife, babes, and mother, Concord
and Boston, the dear old spiritual world and even the dear old devil not
far off. If we will take the good we find, asking no questions, we
shall have heaping measures. The great gifts are not got by analysis.
Everything good is on the highway. The middle region of our being is
the temperate zone. We may climb into the thin and cold realm of pure
geometry and lifeless science, or sink into that of sensation. Between
these extremes is the equator of life, of thought, of spirit, of
poetry,--a narrow belt. Moreover, in popular experience everything
good is on the highway. A collector peeps into all the picture-shops of
Europe for a landscape of Poussin, a crayon-sketch of Salvator; but the
Transfiguration, the Last Judgment, the Communion of St. Jerome, and
what are as transcendent as these, are on the walls of the Vatican, the
Uffizii, or the Louvre, where every footman may see them; to say nothing
of Nature's pictures in every street, of sunsets and sunrises every day,
and the sculpture of the human body never absent. A collector recently
bought at public auction, in London, for one hundred and fifty-seven
guineas, an autograph of Shakspeare; but for not