nstance, a slight
generosity, a drop too much. Without electricity the air would rot,
and without this violence of direction which men and women have,
without a spice of bigot and fanatic, no excitement, no efficiency. We
aim above the mark, to hit the mark. Every act hath some falsehood of
exaggeration in it. And when now and then comes along some sad,
sharp-eyed man, who sees how paltry a game is played, and refuses to
play, but blabs the secret;--how then? is the bird flown? O no, the
wary Nature sends a new troop of fairer forms, of lordlier youths,
with a little more excess of direction to hold them fast to their
several aims; makes them a little wrongheaded in that direction in
which they are rightest, and on goes the game again with new whirl,
for a generation or two more. The child with his sweet pranks, the
fool of his senses, commanded by every sight and sound, without any
power to compare and rank his sensations, abandoned to a whistle or a
painted chip, to a lead dragoon, or a ginger-bread dog,
individualizing everything, generalizing nothing, delighted with every
new thing, lies down at night overpowered by the fatigue, which this
day of continual petty madness has incurred. But Nature has answered
her purpose with the curly, dimpled lunatic. She has tasked every
faculty, and has secured the symmetrical growth of the bodily frame,
by all these attitudes and exertions,--an end of the first importance,
which could not be trusted to any care less perfect than her own. This
glitter, this opaline luster plays round the top of every toy to his
eye, to insure his fidelity, and he is deceived to his good. We are
made alive and kept alive by the same arts. Let the Stoics[516] say
what they please, we do not eat for the good of living, but because
the meat is savory and the appetite is keen. The vegetable life does
not content itself with casting from the flower or the tree a single
seed, but it fills the air and earth with a prodigality of seeds,
that if thousands perish, thousands may plant themselves, that
hundreds may come up, that tens may live to maturity, that, at least,
one may replace the parent. All things betray the same calculated
profusion. The excess of fear with which the animal frame is hedged
round, shrinking from cold, starting at sight of a snake, or a sudden
noise, protects us, through a multitude of groundless alarms, from
some one real danger at last. The lover seeks in marriage his private
feli