Who knows to what coasts of fame the imperious ripples of his personality would circle on before they touched the shores of death?
We may be polite as we please to humanity in the mass, and humanity in occasional rarely encountered individuals is--well, divine; and to such we gladly and humbly and rapturously pay divine honours.

But in any given thousand human beings, poor or rich, what would be your calculation for the average of such divine,--how many faces would you fall down and worship, how many hands would you care to take, how many hearts would you dare to trust?
Alas, the rather good eyes must go so often with the disastrous chin, the mouth succeed where the nose fails, the expansive impulse be checked by the narrow habit, the little gleam of gold be lost in the clay.
Preponderant charm does not crowd into chapels or anywhere else to be minted, it is busy on some vantage height of its own, impressing its own image; and it is with minds maimed by the cruel machinery of life, natures stunted and starved by adverse and innutritive condition, that the artist in man must be satisfied.

With what pathetic little flashes of faculty, what fleeting and illusory glimpses of insight, what waifs and strays of attractiveness, must he work and be happy, and with what a thankfulness that the tenth rate is not twentieth or thirtieth! Then, too, how often must the intractible material be impressed again and again and again before it begins to wear the first trace of your image.

Once a poet has impressed himself with mastery upon words, the impression remains for ever, the words do not disperse in idle crowds when he has done speaking to them, never again to reassemble in a like combination; whereas the greatest oratorical mover of men is doomed, even after his most electrical self-impression, to see his image, as soon as taken, fade away, with a shuffle of escaping feet and a scramble for hats and cloaks.

It was a masterpiece; but with the last touch, see, the colours are flying in a hundred directions, and the very canvas itself is off in a thousand threads of hurried disintegration! But all this, of course, has to do entirely with the poetry of the ministerial life; prosaic even as preaching and praying to the New Zioners may sound, there was yet a drearier prose.