ifferences the Egyptian and the Roman, the
Austrian and the American. The men who come on the stage at one period are
all found to be related to each other. Certain ideas are in the air. We
are all impressionable, for we are made of them; all impressionable, but
some more than others, and these first express them. This explains the
curious contemporaneousness of inventions and discoveries. The truth is in
the air, and the most impressionable brain will announce it first, but all
will announce it a few minutes later. So women, as most susceptible, are
the best index of the coming hour. So the great man, that is, the man most
imbued with the spirit of the time, is the impressionable man--of a fibre
irritable and delicate, like iodine to light. He feels the infinitesimal
attractions. His mind is righter than others, because he yields to a
current so feeble as can be felt only by a needle delicately poised.

The correlation is shown in defects. Moeller, in his "Essay on
Architecture," taught that the building which was fitted accurately to
answer its end would turn out to be beautiful, though beauty had not been
intended. I find the like unity in human structures rather virulent and
pervasive: that a crudity in the blood will appear in the argument; a hump
in the shoulder will appear in the speech and handiwork. If his mind could
be seen, the hump would be seen. If a man has a seesaw in his voice, it
will run into his sentences, into his poem, into the structure of his
fable, into his speculation, into his charity. And, as every man is hunted
by his own daemon, vexed by his own disease, this checks all his activity.

So each man, like each plant, has his parasites. A strong, astringent,
bilious nature, has more truculent enemies than the slugs and moths that
fret my leaves. Such an one has curculios, borers, knife-worms: a swindler
ate him first, then a client, then a quack, then a smooth, plausible
gentleman, bitter and selfish as Moloch.

This correlation really existing can be divined. If the threads are there,
thought can follow and show them. Especially when a soul is quick and
docile; as Chaucer sings,--

Or if the soul of proper kind
Be so perfect as men find,
That it wot what is to come,
And that he warneth all and some,
Of every of their aventures,
By previsions or figures;
But that our flesh hath not might
It to understand aright,
For it is warned too darkly.

Some people are made up of r