ain
capacity we may assuredly count a thousand vain destinies, for every
liberal nature a thousand liberal fates. It is the trouble of the wide
house we hear of, clamorous of its disappointments and desires. The
narrow house has no echoes; yet its pathetic shortcoming might well move
pity. On that strait stage is acted a generous tragedy; to that
inadequate soul is intrusted an enormous sorrow; a tempest of movement
makes its home within that slender nature; and heroic happiness seeks
that timorous heart.

We may, indeed, in part know the narrow house by its
inarticulateness--not, certainly, its fewness of words, but its
inadequacy and imprecision of speech. For, doubtless, right language
enlarges the soul as no other power or influence may do. Who, for
instance, but trusts more nobly for knowing the full word of his
confidence? Who but loves more penetratingly for possessing the ultimate
syllable of his tenderness? There is a "pledging of the word," in
another sense than the ordinary sense of troth and promise. The poet
pledges his word, his sentence, his verse, and finds therein a peculiar
sanction. And I suppose that even physical pain takes on an edge when it
not only enforces a pang but whispers a phrase. Consciousness and the
word are almost as closely united as thought and the word. Almost--not
quite; in spite of its inexpressive speech, the narrow house is aware and
sensitive beyond, as it were, its poor power.

But as to the whole disparity between the destiny and the nature, we know
it to be general. Life is great that is trivially transmitted; love is
great that is vulgarly experienced. Death, too, is a heroic virtue; and
to the keeping of us all is death committed: death, submissive in the
indocile, modest in the fatuous, several in the vulgar, secret in the
familiar. It is destructive, because it not only closes but contradicts
life. Unlikely people die. The one certain thing, it is also the one
improbable. A dreadful paradox is perhaps wrought upon a little nature
that is incapable of death and yet is constrained to die. That is a true
destruction, and the thought of it is obscure.

Happy literature corrects all this disproportion by its immortal pause.
It does not bid us follow man or woman to an illogical conclusion. Mrs.
Micawber never does desert Mr. Micawber. Considering her mental powers,
by the way, an illogical conclusion for her would be manifestly
inappropriate. Shakespear