es he knows on the map or
through the report of his vicegerents, than for the trunk of his empire
under his eyes at home, are we not more concerned about the shadowy life
that we have in the hearts of others, and that portion in their
thoughts and fancies which, in a certain far-away sense, belongs to us,
than about the real knot of our identity--that central metropolis of
self, of which alone we are immediately aware--or the diligent service
of arteries and veins and infinitesimal activity of ganglia, which we
know (as we know a proposition in Euclid) to be the source and substance
of the whole? At the death of every one whom we love, some fair and
honourable portion of our existence falls away, and we are dislodged
from one of these dear provinces; and they are not, perhaps, the most
fortunate who survive a long series of such impoverishments, till their
life and influence narrow gradually into the meagre limit of their own
spirits, and death, when he comes at last, can destroy them at one blow.

NOTE.--To this essay I must in honesty append a word or two of
qualification; for this is one of the points on which a slightly
greater age teaches us a slightly different wisdom:

A youth delights in generalities, and keeps loose from particular
obligations; he jogs on the footpath way, himself pursuing
butterflies, but courteously lending his applause to the advance of
the human species and the coming of the kingdom of justice and love.
As he grows older, he begins to think more narrowly of man's action
in the general, and perhaps more arrogantly of his own in the
particular. He has not that same unspeakable trust in what he would
have done had he been spared, seeing finally that that would have
been little; but he has a far higher notion of the blank that he will
make by dying. A young man feels himself one too many in the world;
his is a painful situation: he has no calling; no obvious utility; no
ties but to his parents, and these he is sure to disregard. I do not
think that a proper allowance has been made for this true cause of
suffering in youth; but by the mere fact of a prolonged existence, we
outgrow either the fact or else the feeling. Either we become so
callously accustomed to our own useless figure in the world, or
else--and this, thank God, in the majority of cases--we so collect
about us the interest or the love of our fellows, so multiply our