he pride of Satan wave back the inadequate gift. Yet
here is a true peril; this it is that sets them to pace the graveyard
alleys and to read, with strange extremes of pity and derision, the
memorials of the dead.

Books were the proper remedy: books of vivid human import, forcing upon
their minds the issues, pleasures, busyness, importance, and immediacy
of that life in which they stand; books of smiling or heroic temper, to
excite or to console; books of a large design, shadowing the complexity
of that game of consequences to which we all sit down, the hanger-back
not least. But the average sermon flees the point, disporting itself in
that eternity of which we know, and need to know, so little; avoiding
the bright, crowded, and momentous fields of life where destiny awaits
us. Upon the average book a writer may be silent; he may set it down to
his ill-hap that when his own youth was in the acrid fermentation, he
should have fallen and fed upon the cheerless fields of Obermann. Yet to
Mr. Matthew Arnold, who led him to these pastures, he still bears a
grudge. The day is perhaps not far off when people will begin to count
"Moll Flanders," ay, or "The Country Wife," more wholesome and more
pious diet than these guide-books to consistent egoism.

But the most inhuman of boys soon wearies of the inhumanity of Obermann.
And even while I still continued to be a haunter of the graveyard, I
began insensibly to turn my attention to the grave-diggers, and was
weaned out of myself to observe the conduct of visitors. This was
day-spring, indeed, to a lad in such great darkness. Not that I began to
see men, or to try to see them, from within, nor to learn charity and
modesty and justice from the sight; but still stared at them externally
from the prison windows of my affectation. Once I remember to have
observed two working women with a baby halting by a grave; there was
something monumental in the grouping, one upright carrying the child,
the other with bowed face crouching by her side. A wreath of immortelles
under a glass dome had thus attracted them; and, drawing near, I
overheard their judgment on that wonder: "Eh! what extravagance!" To a
youth afflicted with the callosity of sentiment, this quaint and
pregnant saying appeared merely base.

My acquaintance with grave-diggers, considering its length, was
unremarkable. One, indeed, whom I found plying his spade in the red
evening, high above Allan Water and in the shadow of D