s he trudged homeward to supper, the
light of the setting sun on his face, expands before me to a dozen
pages. The coffin of the pauper, which to-day I saw carried carelessly
along, is as good a subject as the funeral procession of an emperor.
Craped drum and banner add nothing to death; penury and disrespect take
nothing away. Incontinently my thought moves like a slow-paced hearse
with sable nodding plumes. Two rustic lovers, whispering between the
darkening hedges, is as potent to project my mind into the tender
passion as if I had seen Romeo touch the cheek of Juliet in the
moon-light garden. Seeing a curly-headed child asleep in the sunshine
before a cottage door is sufficient excuse for a discourse on
childhood; quite as good as if I had seen infant Cain asleep in the lap
of Eve with Adam looking on. A lark cannot rise to heaven without
raising as many thoughts as there are notes in its song. Dawn cannot
pour its white light on my village without starting from their dim lair
a hundred reminiscences; nor can sunset burn above yonder trees in the
west without attracting to itself the melancholy of a lifetime. When
spring unfolds her green leaves I would be provoked to indite an essay
on hope and youth, were it not that it is already writ in the carols of
the birds; and I might be tempted in autumn to improve the occasion,
were it not for the rustle of the withered leaves as I walk through the
woods. Compared with that simple music, the saddest-cadenced words
have but a shallow meaning.

The essayist who feeds his thoughts upon the segment of the world which
surrounds him cannot avoid being an egotist; but then his egotism is
not unpleasing. If he be without taint of boastfulness, of
self-sufficiency, of hungry vanity, the world will not press the charge
home. If a man discourses continually of his wines, his plate, his
titled acquaintances, the number and quality of his horses, his
men-servants and maid-servants, he must discourse very skilfully indeed
if he escapes being called a coxcomb. If a man speaks of death--tells
you that the idea of it continually haunts him, that he has the most
insatiable curiosity as to death and dying, that his thought mines in
churchyards like a "demon-mole"--no one is specially offended, and that
this is a dull fellow is the hardest thing likely to be said of him.
Only, the egotism that overcrows you is offensive, that exalts trifles
and takes pleasure in them, that suggest