k--I believe it is
so with all good books, except, perhaps, fiction. The average man lives,
and must live, so wholly in convention, that gunpowder charges of the
truth are more apt to discompose than to invigorate his creed. Either he
cries out upon blasphemy and indecency, and crouches the closer round that
little idol of part-truths and part-conveniences which is the contemporary
deity, or he is convinced by what is new, forgets what is old, and becomes
truly blasphemous and indecent himself. New truth is only useful to
supplement the old; rough truth is only wanted to expand, not to destroy,
our civil and often elegant conventions. He who cannot judge had better
stick to fiction and the daily papers. There he will get little harm, and,
in the first at least, some good.

Close upon the back of my discovery of Whitman, I came under the influence
of Herbert Spencer. No more persuasive rabbi exists, and few better. How
much of his vast structure will bear the touch of time, how much is clay
and how much brass, it were too curious to inquire. But his words, if dry,
are always manly and honest; there dwells in his pages a spirit of highly
abstract joy, plucked naked like an algebraic symbol, but still joyful;
and the reader will find there a _caput-mortuum_ of piety, with little
indeed of its loveliness, but with most of its essentials; and these two
qualities make his a wholesome, as his intellectual vigour makes him a
bracing, writer. I should be much of a hound if I lost my gratitude to
Herbert Spencer.

"Goethe's Life," by Lewes, had a great importance for me when it first
fell into my hands--a strange instance of the partiality of man's good and
man's evil. I know no one whom I less admire than Goethe; he seems a very
epitome of the sins of genius, breaking open the doors of private life,
and wantonly wounding friends, in that crowning offence of "Werther," and
in his own character a mere pen-and-ink Napoleon, conscious of the rights
and duties of superior talents as a Spanish inquisitor was conscious of
the rights and duties of his office. And yet in his fine devotion to his
art, in his honest and serviceable friendship for Schiller, what lessons
are contained! Biography, usually so false to its office, does here for
once perform for us some of the work of fiction, reminding us, that is, of
the truly mingled tissue of man's nature, and how huge faults and shining
virtues cohabit and persevere in the same character. H