its passions, and
sift how much is the foam of speech, and how little is the well-spring
of thought. Well, my dear, it is a very uncommon creature if it don't
turn out just like the Staubbach."

* * *

I think if you knew what you did, even the most thoughtless amongst you
would not sanction with your praise, and encourage with your coin, the
brutality that trains dancing-dogs.

Have human mimes if you will; it is natural to humanity to caper and
grimace and act a part: but for pity's sake do not countenance the
torture with which Avarice mercilessly trains us "dumb beasts" for the
trade of tricks.

"The Clown-dog draws throngs to laugh and applaud," says some
advertisement: yes, and I knew a very clever clown-dog once. His feet
were blistered with the hot irons on which he had been taught to dance;
his teeth had been drawn lest he should use his natural weapons against
his cowardly tyrants; his skin beneath his short white hair was black
with bruises; though originally of magnificent courage, his spirit had
been so broken by torture that he trembled if a leaf blew against him;
and his eyes--well, if the crowds that applauded him had once looked at
those patient, wistful, quiet eyes, with their unutterable despair,
those crowds would have laughed no more, unless they had indeed been
devils.

Who has delivered us unto you to be thus tortured, and martyred?
Who?--Oh, that awful eternal mystery that ye yourselves cannot explain!

* * *

Believe me, it is the light or the darkness of our own fate that either
gives "greenness to the grass and glory to the flower," or leaves both
sickly, wan, and colourless. A little breadth of sunny lawn, the
spreading shadow of a single beech, the gentle click of a little
garden-gate, the scent of some simple summer roses--how fair these are
in your memory because of a voice which then was on your ear, because of
eyes that then gazed in your own. And the grandeur of Nile, and the
lustre of the after-glow, and the solemn desolation of Carnac, and the
wondrous beauty of the flushed sea of tossing reeds, are all cold, and
dead, and valueless, because in those eyes no love now lies for you;
because that voice, for you, is now for ever silent.

* * *

For, write as you will of the glory of poverty, and of the ennui of
pleasure, there is no life like this life, wherein to the sight and the
sense all things minister; wherefrom ha