Tempo:
62 INTERIOR VISION.
higher destiny —-a hypocritical putting-forward of reliance upon, and acknowledgment of, a beneficent superintending Providence in the abstract. The time is so unenthusiastic, everything is so questioned for its utilities, and all is so toned down to commonplace, that it is the voice of exclamation and alarm only that can arouse. To obtain a hearing we must call aloud.
‘We are involving ourselves in too many deductions. We are thickening ourselves in our mechanic dreams too much. Weare posing ourselves with systems. We are living the heart ont of us. We are making very clockwork of the grand intensities of nature. Formalism is becoming as — a second nature to us, and our method of living is the translation of the life-long charities into pounds and pence. Jiven our very fine cases — as we may so, perhaps, too ‘curiously’ figure it—are growing vastly too fine, vastly too wonderful, and too elaborately wrought for us. Why not be of rougher material, and of mere painted outside — of bulk and not sentiment — of the coarse, solid components — of wood and of varnish — instead of making up of such exquisite vermilion blood, and of flesh of a marble-like whiteness in the female examples of us? There be something in superb colors, look you! Why, when we are so laboriously casting ourselves as into ingots for the devil’s golden Hades, should we make all this hypocritical fass about moral improvement? Surely we mightas well become stumps — blocks —turn into dead, hard wood, as mean and unhandsome as Lapland idols, when ali our foolish pity, and all our human sympathies, are being most convincingly argued and demonstrated out of us; and when the very affections are strangled —oh, think me not too direct and plain-spoken, my dear, contented, but, perhaps, too compliant reader — like irregular children; those which are only sure to bring their parents into discredit. Children of no town, since they belong not to a town, where money abounds! Owning no love, since they cannot claim affinity with the love of bank-notes !
‘“‘We have forgotten the inside of the cup in the burnishing of the exterior. Nor—after all—do we live half our life. Our triumph in the common conveniences of life —spite of our vaunting of our perfection in them — go not great lengths. We can forge ananchor. But we cannot cook a dinner. Wecan spin thousands of yards of calico in two or three revolutions of a wheel. But we, personally, curve so indifferently, that we can scarcely make a bow. The banks groan with our gold. And yet we have not the knowledge profitably — by which we here mean towards our soul’s advantage — to expend a single dollar. In this universal Plutusconversion, our heads —so to speak —are growing into gold, while our hearts are fast becoming but as the merest blown paper-bag inside of us!
“Is this Dutchlike life 6f toys and trifles right? Is this all of nature; and all ofus? Oh, this wilderness of flowers, and, oh, the eternal forests! Let the mind, for a moment, glance at that inexpressible microcosm — far from the vulgar disturbances of the pavements, and out of sight of the
higher destiny —-a hypocritical putting-forward of reliance upon, and acknowledgment of, a beneficent superintending Providence in the abstract. The time is so unenthusiastic, everything is so questioned for its utilities, and all is so toned down to commonplace, that it is the voice of exclamation and alarm only that can arouse. To obtain a hearing we must call aloud.
‘We are involving ourselves in too many deductions. We are thickening ourselves in our mechanic dreams too much. Weare posing ourselves with systems. We are living the heart ont of us. We are making very clockwork of the grand intensities of nature. Formalism is becoming as — a second nature to us, and our method of living is the translation of the life-long charities into pounds and pence. Jiven our very fine cases — as we may so, perhaps, too ‘curiously’ figure it—are growing vastly too fine, vastly too wonderful, and too elaborately wrought for us. Why not be of rougher material, and of mere painted outside — of bulk and not sentiment — of the coarse, solid components — of wood and of varnish — instead of making up of such exquisite vermilion blood, and of flesh of a marble-like whiteness in the female examples of us? There be something in superb colors, look you! Why, when we are so laboriously casting ourselves as into ingots for the devil’s golden Hades, should we make all this hypocritical fass about moral improvement? Surely we mightas well become stumps — blocks —turn into dead, hard wood, as mean and unhandsome as Lapland idols, when ali our foolish pity, and all our human sympathies, are being most convincingly argued and demonstrated out of us; and when the very affections are strangled —oh, think me not too direct and plain-spoken, my dear, contented, but, perhaps, too compliant reader — like irregular children; those which are only sure to bring their parents into discredit. Children of no town, since they belong not to a town, where money abounds! Owning no love, since they cannot claim affinity with the love of bank-notes !
‘“‘We have forgotten the inside of the cup in the burnishing of the exterior. Nor—after all—do we live half our life. Our triumph in the common conveniences of life —spite of our vaunting of our perfection in them — go not great lengths. We can forge ananchor. But we cannot cook a dinner. Wecan spin thousands of yards of calico in two or three revolutions of a wheel. But we, personally, curve so indifferently, that we can scarcely make a bow. The banks groan with our gold. And yet we have not the knowledge profitably — by which we here mean towards our soul’s advantage — to expend a single dollar. In this universal Plutusconversion, our heads —so to speak —are growing into gold, while our hearts are fast becoming but as the merest blown paper-bag inside of us!
“Is this Dutchlike life 6f toys and trifles right? Is this all of nature; and all ofus? Oh, this wilderness of flowers, and, oh, the eternal forests! Let the mind, for a moment, glance at that inexpressible microcosm — far from the vulgar disturbances of the pavements, and out of sight of the
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