in a separate
individual, and the others are proportionally relieved. We sometimes see a
change of expression in our companion, and say, his father, or his mother,
comes to the windows of his eyes, and sometimes a remote relative. In
different hours, a man represents each of several of his ancestors, as if
there were seven or eight of us rolled up in each man's skin,--seven or
eight ancestors at least,--and they constitute the variety of notes for
that new piece of music which his life is. At the corner of the street,
you read the possibility of each passenger, in the facial angle, in the
complexion, in the depth of his eye. His parentage determines it. Men are
what their mothers made them. You may as well ask a loom which weaves
huckaback, why it does not make cashmere, as expect poetry from this
engineer or a chemical discovery from that jobber. Ask the digger in the
ditch to explain Newton's laws: the fine organs of his brains have been
pinched by overwork and squalid poverty from father to son, for a hundred
years. When each comes forth from his mother's womb, the gate of gifts
closes behind him. Let him value his hands and feet, he has but one pair.
So he has but one future, and that is already predetermined in his lobes,
and described in that little fatty face, pig-eye, and squat form. All the
privilege and all the legislation of the world cannot meddle or help to
make a poet or a prince of him.

Jesus said, "When he looketh on her, he hath committed adultery." But he
is an adulterer before he has yet looked on the woman, by the superfluity
of animal, and the defect of thought, in his constitution. Who meets him,
or who meets her, in the street, sees that they are ripe to be each
other's victim.

In certain men, digestion and sex absorb the vital force, and the stronger
these are, the individual is so much weaker. The more of these drones
perish, the better for the hive. If, later, they give birth to some
superior individual, with force enough to add to this animal a new aim,
and a complete apparatus to work it out, all the ancestors are gladly
forgotten. Most men and most women are merely one couple more. Now and
then, one has a new cell or camarilla opened in his brain--an
architectural, a musical, or a philological knack, some stray taste or
talent for flowers, or chemistry, or pigments, or story-telling, a good
hand for drawing, a good foot for dancing, an athletic frame for wide
journeying, etc.--which skill