observation, we may
put a check upon our spirit of prejudice, and carry with us restoratives
of temper and spirits which may be of essential service to us in our
task.

The observer must have sympathy; and his sympathy must be untrammelled
and unreserved. If a traveller be a geological inquirer, he may have a
heart as hard as the rocks he shivers, and yet succeed in his immediate
objects: if he be a student of the fine arts, he may be as silent as a
picture, and yet gain his ends: if he be a statistical investigator, he
may be as abstract as a column of figures, and yet learn what he wants
to know: but an observer of morals and manners will be liable to
deception at every turn, if he does not find his way to hearts and
minds. Nothing was ever more true than that "as face answers to face in
water, so is the heart of man." To the traveller there are two meanings
in this wise saying, both worthy of his best attention. It means that
the action of the heart will meet a corresponding action, and that the
nature of the heart will meet a corresponding nature. Openness and
warmth of heart will be greeted with openness and warmth:--this is one
truth. Hearts, generous or selfish, pure or gross, gay or sad, will
understand, and therefore be likely to report of, only their like:--this
is another truth.

There is the same human heart everywhere,--the universal growth of mind
and life,--ready to open to the sunshine of sympathy, flourishing in the
enclosures of cities, and blossoming wherever dropped in the wilderness;
but folding up when touched by chill, and drooping in gloom. As well
might the Erl-king go and play the florist in the groves and plains of
the tropics, as an unsympathizing man render an account of society. It
will all turn to stubble and sapless rigidity before his eyes.

There is the same human heart everywhere; and, if the traveller has a
good one himself, he will presently find this out, whatever may have
been his fears at home of checks to his sympathy from difference of
education, objects in life, &c. There is no place where people do not
suffer and enjoy; where love is not the high festival of life; where
birth and death are not occasions of emotion; where parents are not
proud of their boy-children; where thoughtful minds do not speculate
upon the two eternities; where, in short, there is not broad ground on
which any two human beings may meet and clasp hands, if they have but
unsophisticated hearts. If a m