without speech, and above speech, and that no right action of ours is quite unaffecting to our friends, at whatever distance; for the influence of action is not to be measured by miles.

¶ Elegance comes of no breeding, but of birth.

¶ You can not give anything to a magnanimous person. After you have served him, he at once puts you in debt by his magnanimity.

No

O man at last believes that he can be lost, nor that the crime in him is as black as in the felon. Because the intellect qualifies in our own case the moral judgments. For there is no crime to the intellect. That is antinomian or hypernomian, and judges law as well as fact.

The gift, to be true, must be the flowing of the giver unto me, correspondent to my flowing unto him. When the waters are at level, then my goods pass to him, and his to me. All his are mine, all mine his.

¶No rent-roll nor army-list can dignify skulking and dissimulation: and the first point of courtesy must always be truth, as really all the forms of good-breeding point that way.

¶ A beautiful form is better than a beautiful face; a beautiful behavior is better than a beautiful form: it gives a higher pleasure than statues or pictures; it is the finest of the fine arts.

[ATURE, as we know her, is no saint. Her darlings,

N

the great, the strong, the beautiful, are not children of our law, do not come out of the Sunday School, nor weigh their food, nor punctually keep the Commandments. If we will be strong with her strength, we must not harbor such disconsolate consciences, borrowed too from the consciences of other nations:

¶ Everything that is called fashion and courtesy humbles itself before the cause and fountain of honor, creator of titles and dignities, namely, the heart of love.

¶ It seems as if the day was not wholly profane, in which we have given heed to some natural object.

A sainted soul is always elegant.

MAN

[AN lives by pulses; our organic movements are such; and the chemical and ethereal agents are undulatory and alternate; and the mind goes antagonizing on, and never prospers but by fits. We thrive by casualties. Our chief experiences have been casual.

¶The most attractive class of people are those who are powerful obliquely, and not by the direct stroke: men of genius, but not yet accredited: one gets the cheer of their light, without paying too great a tax.

The service a man renders his friend is trivial and selfish compared with the service he knows his friend stood in readiness to yield to him, alike before he had begun to serve his friend, and now also.

The difference between landscape and landscape is small, but there is a great difference in the beholders.

The expectation of gratitude is mean, and is continually punished by the total insensibility of the obliged person.

It is a great happiness to get off without injury and heart-burning, from one who has had the ill luck to be served by you.

¶ I find that I am not much to you; you do not need me; you do not feel me; then I am thrust out of doors, though you proffer me house and lands.

¶ It is an instance of our faith in ourselves that men never speak of crime as lightly as they think: or every man thinks a latitude safe for himself, which is nowise to be indulged to another. The act looks very differently on the inside, and on the outside: in its quality, and in its consequences.

WHAT

AT is rich? Are you rich enough to help anybody? to succor the unfashionable and the eccentric? rich enough to make the Canadian in his wagon, the itinerant with his consul's paper which commends him “to the charitable," the swarthy Italian with his few broken words of English, the lame pauper hunted by overseers from town to town, even the poor insane or besotted wreck of man or woman, feel the noble exception of your presence and your house, from the general bleakness and stoniness; to make such feel that they were greeted with a voice which made them both remember and hope?

¶ What is vulgar, but to refuse the claim on acute and conclusive reasons? What is gentle, but to allow it, and give their heart and yours one holiday from the national caution? Without the rich heart, wealth is an ugly beggar.

THE

HE law of benefits is a difficult channel, which requires careful sailing, or rude boats. It is not the office of a man to receive gifts. How dare you give them? We wish to be self-sustained. We do not quite forgive a giver. The hand that feeds us is in some danger of being bitten. We can receive anything from love, for that is a way of receiving it from ourselves; but not from any one who assumes to bestow. We sometimes hate the meat which we eat, because there seems something of degrading dependence in living by it.

66

Brother, if Jove to thee a present make,

Take heed that from his hands thou nothing take.”

We ask the whole. Nothing else will content us. We arraign society, if it do not give us, besides earth, and fire, and water, opportunity, love, reverence and objects of veneration.

¶ He is a good man who can receive a gift well.

W

HEN that love which is all-suffering, all-abstaining, all-inspiring, which has vowed to itself that it will be a wretch and also a fool in this world, sooner than soil its white hands by any compliances, comes into our streets and houses-only the pure and aspiring can know its face, and the only compliment they can pay it is to own it

WE

E are such lovers of self-reliance that we excuse in a man many sins, if he will show us a complete satisfaction in his position, which asks no leave to be, of mine, or any man's good opinion. But any deference to some eminent man or woman of the world forfeits all privilege of nobility. He is an underling: I have nothing to do with him; I will speak with his master.

¶ Necessity does everything well.

OU

UR tokens of compliment and love are for the most part barbarous. Rings and other jewels are not gifts, but apologies of gifts. The only gift is a portion of thyself. Thou must bleed for me. Therefore, the poet brings his poem; the shepherd, his lamb; the farmer, corn; the miner, a gem; the sailor, coral and shells; the painter, his picture; the girl, a handkerchief of her own sewing.

¶ The world is mind precipitated, and the volatile essence is forever escaping again into the state of free thought.

¶ We receive glances from the heavenly bodies, which call us to solitude, and foretell the remotest future. The blue zenith is the point in which romance and reality meet.

"OOD sense and character make their own forms every

GOOD

moment, and speak or abstain, take wine or refuse it, stay or go, sit in a chair or sprawl with children on the floor, or stand on their head, or what else soever, in a new and aboriginal way: and that strong will is always in fashion, let who will be unfashionable.