f things. But the character we have before us is a
kind of prophecy of this repose and simplicity, coming as it were in
the order of grace, not of nature, by [250] some happy gift, or
accident of birth or constitution, showing that it is indeed within the
limits of man's destiny. Like all the higher forms of inward life this
character is a subtle blending and interpenetration of intellectual,
moral and spiritual elements. But it is as a phase of intellect, of
culture, that it is most striking and forcible. It is a mind of taste
lighted up by some spiritual ray within. What is meant by taste is an
imperfect intellectual state; it is but a sterile kind of culture. It
is the mental attitude, the intellectual manner of perfect culture,
assumed by a happy instinct. Its beautiful way of handling everything
that appeals to the senses and the intellect is really directed by the
laws of the higher intellectual life, but while culture is able to
trace those laws, mere taste is unaware of them. In the character
before us, taste, without ceasing to be instructive, is far more than a
mental attitude or manner. A magnificent intellectual force is latent
within it. It is like the reminiscence of a forgotten culture that
once adorned the mind; as if the mind of one philosophesas pote met'
erotos,+ fallen into a new cycle, were beginning its spiritual progress
over again, but with a certain power of anticipating its stages. It
has the freshness without the shallowness of taste, the range and
seriousness of culture without its strain and over-consciousness. Such
a habit may be described as wistfulness of mind, the feeling that there
is "so much to [251] know," rather as a longing after what is
unattainable, than as a hope to apprehend. Its ethical result is an
intellectual guilelessness, or integrity, that instinctively prefers
what is direct and clear, lest one's own confusion and intransparency
should hinder the transmission from without of light that is not yet
inward. He who is ever looking for the breaking of a light he knows
not whence about him, notes with a strange heedfulness the faintest
paleness in the sky. That truthfulness of temper, that receptivity,
which professors often strive in vain to form, is engendered here less
by wisdom than by innocence. Such a character is like a relic from the
classical age, laid open by accident to our alien modern atmosphere.
It has something of the clear ring, the eternal outli