sing the
understanding, with its triumphant pride and subtilty, out of the
question, and the child making his choice under the spontaneous sense
of the true and the false. For, were it otherwise, and the choice
indifferent, what possible foundation for the commonest acts of life,
even as it respects himself, would there be to him who should sow with
lies the very soil of his growing nature. It is time enough in manhood
to begin to lie to one's self; but a self-lying youth can have no
proper self to rest on, at any period. So that the greatest liar, even
Ferdinand Mendez Pinto, must have loved the truth,--at least at one
time of his life. We say _loved_; for a voluntary choice implies
of necessity some degree of pleasure in the choosing, however faint
the emotion or insignificant the object. It is, therefore, _caeteris
paribus_, not only necessary, but natural, to find pleasure in
truth.

Now the question is, whether the pleasurable emotion, which is, so
to speak, the indigenous growth of Truth, can in any case be free of
self, or some personal gratification. To this, we apprehend, there
will be no lack of answer. Nay, the answer has already been given from
the dark antiquity of ages, that even for her own exceeding loveliness
has Truth been canonized. If there was any thing of self in the
_Eureka_ of Pythagoras, there was not in the acclamations of
his country who rejoiced with him. But we may doubt the feeling, if
applied to him. If wealth or fame has sometimes followed in the track
of Genius, it has followed as an accident, but never preceded, as the
efficient conductor to any great discovery. For what is Genius but the
prophetic revealer of the unseen True, that can neither be purchased
nor bribed into light? If it come, then, at all, it must needs be
evoked by a kindred love as pure as itself. Shall we appeal to the
artist? If he deserve the name, he will disdain the imputation that
either wealth or fame has ever aided at the birth of his ideal
offspring: it was Truth that smiled upon him, that made light his
travail, that blessed their birth, and, by her fond recognition,
imparted to his breast her own most pure, unimpassioned emotion. But,
whatever mixed feeling, through the infirmity of the agent, may have
influenced the artist, whether poet or painter, there can be but one
feeling in the reader or spectator.

Indeed, so imperishable is this property of Truth, that it seems to
lose nothing of its power, even w