Nature covers all her works with a varnish of beauty, like the tender bloom that is breathed, as it were, on the surface of a peach or a plum.  Painters and poets lay themselves out to take off this varnish, to store it up, and give it us to be enjoyed at our leisure.  We drink deep of this beauty long before we enter upon life itself; and when afterwards we come to see the works of Nature for ourselves, the varnish is gone:  the artists have used it up and we have enjoyed it in advance.  Thus it is that the world so often appears harsh and devoid of charm, nay, actually repulsive.  It were better to leave us to discover the varnish for ourselves.  This would mean that we should not enjoy it all at once and in large quantities; we should have no finished pictures, no perfect poems; but we should look at all things in that genial and pleasing light in which even now a child of Nature sometimes sees them—­some one who has not anticipated his aesthetic pleasures by the help of art, or taken the charms of life too early.

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The Cathedral in Mayence is so shut in by the houses that are built round about it, that there is no one spot from which you can see it as a whole.  This is symbolic of everything great or beautiful in the world.  It ought to exist for its own sake alone, but before very long it is misused to serve alien ends.  People come from all directions wanting to find in it support and maintenance for themselves; they stand in the way and spoil its effect.  To be sure, there is nothing surprising in this, for in a world of need and imperfection everything is seized upon which can be used to satisfy want.  Nothing is exempt from this service, no, not even those very things which arise only when need and want are for a moment lost sight of—­the beautiful and the true, sought for their own sakes.

This is especially illustrated and corroborated in the case of institutions—­whether great or small, wealthy or poor, founded, no matter in what century or in what land, to maintain and advance human knowledge, and generally to afford help to those intellectual efforts which ennoble the race.  Wherever these institutions may be, it is not long before people sneak up to them under the pretence of wishing to further those special ends, while they are really led on by the desire to secure the emoluments which have been left for their furtherance, and thus to satisfy certain coarse and brutal instincts of their own.  Thus it is that we come to have so many charlatans in every branch of knowledge.  The charlatan takes very different shapes according to circumstances; but at bottom he is a man who cares nothing about knowledge for its own sake, and only strives to gain the semblance of it that he may use it for his own personal ends, which are always selfish and material.

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Every hero is a Samson.  The strong man succumbs to the intrigues of the weak and the many; and if in the end he loses all patience he crushes both them and himself.  Or he is like Gulliver at Lilliput, overwhelmed by an enormous number of little men.