njectured or implicit envy; who conceives the jealousy they may
have covertly to endure, enjoys it, and thus silently begins and ends
within his own morosity the story of his base advantage.

Vanity has indignity as its underside. And how shall even the pleasure
in beauty be altogether without it? For since beauty, like other human
things, is comparative, how shall the praise, or the admiration, thereof
be free from (at least) some reference to the unbeautiful? Or from some
allusion to the less beautiful? Yet this, if inevitable, is little; it
may be negligible. The triumph of beauty is all but innocent. It is
where no beauty is in question that lurks the unconfessed appeal to envy.
That appeal is not an appeal to admiration--it lacks what is the genial
part of egoism. For who, except perhaps a recent writer of articles on
society in America, really admires a man for living in the approved part
of Boston?

The vanity of addresses is as frequent with us as on the western side of
the Atlantic. It is a vanity without that single apology for
vanity--gaiety of heart. The first things that are, in London,
sacrificed to it are the beautiful day and the facing of the sky. There
are some amongst us whose wives have constrained them to dwell
underground for love of an address. Modern and foolish is that contempt
for daylight. To the simple, day is beautiful; and "beautiful as day" a
happy proverb.

Over all colour, flesh, aspect, surface, manifestation of vitality,
dwells one certain dominance. And if One, vigilant for the dues of His
vicegerent, should ask us whose is the image and superscription? We
reply, The Sun's.

The London air shortens and clips those beams, and yet leaves daylight
the finest thing we know. Beauty of artificial lights is in our streets
at night, but their chief beauty is when, just before night, they adorn
the day. The late daylight honours them when it so easily and sweetly
subdues and overcomes them, giving to the electric lamp, to the taper, to
the hearth fire, and to the spark, a loveliness not their own.

With the unpublished desire to be envied, whereto here and there amongst
us is sacrificed the sky, abides the desire for an object of unconfessed
contempt. Both are contrary to that more authentic, that essential
solitariness wherein a few men have the grace to live, and wherein all
men are compelled to die. Both are unpublished even now, even in our
days, when it costs men so