eyes, sans taste, sans everything."

The glory of old age ceases when second childishness and oblivion begin;
therefore we thanked God for His goodness in taking the lonely old man
home.

Long as was Landor's life and literary career, little is known of him
personally. There are glimpses of him in Lady Blessington's Memoirs; and
Emerson, in his "English Traits," describes two interviews with him in
1843 at his Florentine villa. "I found him noble and courteous, living
in a cloud of pictures.... I had inferred from his books, or magnified
from some anecdotes, an impression of Achillean wrath,--an untamable
petulance. I do not know whether the imputation were just or not, but
certainly on this May-day his courtesy veiled that haughty mind, and he
was the most patient and gentle of hosts." According to the world's
opinion, it was not always "May-day" with Landor, for the world neither
preaches nor practices that rarity, human charity. Its instinct is a
species of divining-rod, the virtue of which seems to be limited to a
fatal facility in discovering frailty. Great men and women live in glass
houses, and what passer-by can resist the temptation to throw stones? Is
it generous, or even just, in scoffers who are safely hidden behind
bricks and mortar, to take advantage of the glass? Could they show a
nobler record if subjected to equally close scrutiny? Worshippers, too,
at the shrines of inspiration are prone to look for ideal lives in their
elect, forgetting that the divine afflatus is, after all, a gift,--that
great thoughts are not the daily food of even the finest intellects. It
is a necessity of nature for valleys to lie beneath the lofty mountain
peaks that daringly pierce the sky; and it would seem as though the
artist-temperament, after rising to sublime heights of ecstasy, plunged
into corresponding depths, showing thereby the supremacy of the man over
the god. Then is there much sighing and shaking of heads at the failings
of genius, whereas genius in its depths sinks no lower than the ordinary
level of mankind. It simply proves its title-deeds to mortality.
Humanity at best is weak, and can only be divine by flashes. The Pythia
was a stupid old woman, saving when she sat upon the tripod. Seeing
genius to the best advantage in its work,--not always, but most
frequently,--they are wisest who love the artist without demanding
personal perfection. It is rational to conclude that the loftiest
possible genius should