Great Men, Great Nations, Have Not Been

The Astonishment Of Life Is The Absence Of Any Appearances Of Reconciliation Between The Theory And The Practice Of Life.

It Is Long Ere We Discover How Rich We Are. Our History, We Are Sure, Is Quite Tame: We Have Nothing To Write, Nothing To Infer. But Our Wiser Years Still Run Back To The Despised Recollections Of Childhood, And Always We Are Fishing Up Some Wonderful Article Out Of That Pond; Until, By And By, We Begin To Suspect That The Biography Of The One Foolish Person We Know Is, In Reality, Nothing Less Than The Miniature Paraphrase Of The Hundred Volumes Of The Universal History.

Happy Will That House Be In Which The Relations Are Formed From Character; After The Highest, And Not After The Lowest Order; The House In Which Character Marries, And Not Confusion And A Miscellany Of Unavowable Motives.

And Yet--it Is Not Beauty That Inspires The Deepest Passion. Beauty Without Grace Is The Hook Without The Bait. Beauty, Without Expression, Tires.

But The Best Read Naturalist Who Lends An Entire And Devout Attention To Truth, Will See That There Remains Much To Learn Of His Relation To The World, And That It Is Not To Be Learned By Any Addition Or Subtraction Or Other Comparison Of Known Quantities, But Is Arrived At By Untaught Sallies Of The Spirit, By A Continual Self-recovery, And By Entire Humility.