ng, the coral-insect who has devoted his life to a participle,
first-edition men, and all those various bookworms who, without
impropriety be it spoken, are the maggots that breed in the dung of the
great. A certain friend of mine always appears to me in the similitude of
a first edition of one of Mr. Hardy's novels. I have the greatest
difficulty at times to prevent myself forcibly setting him upon my shelf
to complete my set; for, oddly enough, he is the one bit of Hardyana I
lack. In which confession I let the reader into the secret of my own petty
limitations. To have one's horizon bounded by a book-plate, to have no
hope, no wish in life, beyond a first edition! The workers, however
sectional, have some place in the text of the great book of life, but such
mere testers and tasters of existence have hardly a place even in the
gloss, though it be printed in the most microscopic diamond.

And every moment, as we said, we are being turned out smaller and smaller
from the mill of Time. You ask your little boy what he would like to be
when he grows up. To your consternation he answers, 'A man!' You hide your
face: you cannot tell him how impossible it is now to be that. Poor little
chap! He is born centuries too late. You cannot promise even that he shall
be a tailor, for by the time he is old enough to be apprenticed, how do
you know how that ancient profession may be divided up? May you not have
sadly to tell him: 'My poor boy, it is impossible to make you that--for
there are no longer any whole-tailors. You may, if you like, be a
thread-waxer or a needle-threader; you may be one of the thirty men it
takes to make a buttonhole, but a complete tailor--alas! it is
impossible.'

Who will save us from this remorseless law of eternal subdivision? To make
one complete man out of all this vast collection of snips and snippets of
humanity. To piece all the trades, professions, and fads together, like a
puzzle, till one saw the honest face of a genuine man round and whole once
more. To take these dry bones of the Valley of Commerce, and powerfully
breathe into them the unifying breath of life, that once more they stand
up, not as fractional bones of the wrist or the ankle of manhood, but
mighty, full-blooded men as of old. Ah! we must wait for a new creation
for that.

The mystics have a suggestive fancy that all our vast complex life once
existed as a peaceful unit in the mind of God. But as God, brooding in
the abyss, medit