ature's success in holding on to a personal identity, through the
entire change of matter that has been constantly taking place for so
many years. I know very well there is here no part of the Herbert
whose hand I had shaken at the Commencement parting; but it is an
astonishing reproduction of him,--a material likeness; and now for
the spiritual.

Such a wide chance for divergence in the spiritual. It has been such
a busy world for twenty years. So many things have been torn up by
the roots again that were settled when we left college. There were
to be no more wars; democracy was democracy, and progress, the
differentiation of the individual, was a mere question of clothes; if
you want to be different, go to your tailor; nobody had demonstrated
that there is a man-soul and a woman-soul, and that each is in
reality only a half-soul,--putting the race, so to speak, upon the
half-shell. The social oyster being opened, there appears to be two
shells and only one oyster; who shall have it? So many new canons of
taste, of criticism, of morality have been set up; there has been
such a resurrection of historical reputations for new judgment, and
there have been so many discoveries, geographical, archaeological,
geological, biological, that the earth is not at all what it was
supposed to be; and our philosophers are much more anxious to
ascertain where we came from than whither we are going. In this
whirl and turmoil of new ideas, nature, which has only the single end
of maintaining the physical identity in the body, works on
undisturbed, replacing particle for particle, and preserving the
likeness more skillfully than a mosaic artist in the Vatican; she has
not even her materials sorted and labeled, as the Roman artist has
his thousands of bits of color; and man is all the while doing his
best to confuse the process, by changing his climate, his diet, all
his surroundings, without the least care to remain himself. But the
mind?

It is more difficult to get acquainted with Herbert than with an
entire stranger, for I have my prepossessions about him, and do not
find him in so many places where I expect to find him. He is full of
criticism of the authors I admire; he thinks stupid or improper the
books I most read; he is skeptical about the "movements" I am
interested in; he has formed very different opinions from mine
concerning a hundred men and women of the present day; we used to eat
from one dish; we could n't now find any