fix....

"Under a like difficulty, in spite even of our personal intercourse,
do we still lie with regard to the professor's moral feeling. Gleams
of an ethereal love burst forth from him, soft wailings of infinite
pity; he could clasp the whole universe into his bosom, and
keep it warm; it seems as if under that rude exterior there dwelt a
very seraph. Then, again, he is so sly, and still so imperturbably
saturnine; shows such indifference, malign coolness, towards all that
men strive after; and ever with some half-visible wrinkle of a bitter,
sardonic humor, if indeed it be not mere stolid callousness,--that you
look on him almost with a shudder, as on some incarnate
Mephistopheles, to whom this great terrestrial and celestial Round,
after all, were but some huge foolish whirligig, where kings and
beggars, and angels and demons, and stars and street-sweepings, were
chaotically whirled, in which only children could take interest."

VII.

ERRATA.[7]

[7] From Lippincott's Magazine, 1870.

Words are the counters of thought; speech is the vocalization of the
soul; style is the luminous incarnation of reason and emotion. Thence
it behooves scholars, the wardens of language, to keep over words a
watch as keen and sleepless as a dutiful guardian keeps over his
pupils. A prime office of this guardianship is to take care lest
language fall into loose ways; for words being the final elements into
which all speech resolves itself, if they grow weak by negligence or
abuse, speech loses its firmness, veracity, and expressiveness. Style
may be likened to a close Tyrian garment woven by poets and thinkers
out of words and phrases for the clothing and adornment of the mind;
and the strength and fineness of the tissue, together with its
beauties of color, depend on the purity and precision, the
transparency and directness of its threads, which are words.

A humble freeman of the guild of scholars would here use his
privilege to call attention to some abuses in words and
phrases,--abuses which are not only prevalent in the spoken and
written speech of the many, but which disfigure, occasionally, the
pages, even of good writers. These are not errors that betoken or lead
to general final corruption, and the great Anglo-Saxo-Norman race is
many centuries distant from the period when it may be expected to show
signs of that decadence which, visible at first in the waning moral
and intellectual energies of a people, soon