r, she carves and
chisels, and strives to evoke from the block a breathing statue. She
may succeed so far as that you shall become her Frankenstein, a great,
sad, monstrous, incessant, inevitable caricature of her ideal, the
monument at once of her success and her failure, the object of her
compassion, the intimate sorrow of her soul, a vast and dreadful form
into which her creative power can breathe the breath of life, but not
of sympathy. Perhaps she loves you with a remorseful, pitying,
protesting love, and carries you on her shuddering shoulders to the
grave. Probably, as she is good and wise, you will never find it out.
A limpid brook ripples in beauty and bloom by the side of muddy,
stagnant self-complacence, and you discern no essential difference.
"Water's water," you say, with your broad, stupid generalization, and
go oozing along contentedly through peat-bogs and meadow-ditches,
mounting, perhaps, in moments of inspiration, to the moderate sublimity
of a cranberry-meadow, but subsiding with entire satisfaction into a
muck-puddle: and all the while the little brook that you patronize
when you are full-fed, and snub when you are hungry, and look upon
always,--the little brook is singing its own melody through grove and
orchard and sweet wild-wood,--singing with the birds and the blooms
songs that you cannot hear; but they are heard by the silent stars,
singing on and on into a broader and deeper destiny, till it pours, one
day, its last earthly note, and becomes forevermore the unutterable sea.

And you are nothing but a ditch.

No, my friend, Lucy will drive with you, and to talk to you, and sing
your songs; she will take care of you, and pray for you, and cry when
you go to the war; if she is not your daughter or your sister, she
will, perhaps, in a moment of weakness or insanity, marry you; she will
be a faithful wife, and float you to the end; but if you wish to be her
love, her hero, her ideal, her delight, her spontaneity, her utter rest
and ultimatum, you must attune your soul to fine issues,--you must
bring out the angel in you, and keep the brute under. It is not that
you shall stop making shoes, and begin to write poetry. That is just
as much discrimination as you have. Tell you to be gentle, and you
think we will have you dissolve into milk-and-water; tell you to be
polite, and you infer hypocrisy; to be neat, and you leap over into
dandyism, fancying all the while that bluster is manliness. N