singular epithet, which serves as a refrain when his song is full, or with which as with a knitting-needle he catches up the stitches, if he has chanced now and then to let fall a row.  For the higher kinds of poetry he has no sense, and his talk on that subject is delightfully and gorgeously absurd; he sometimes stops a minute to laugh at it himself, then begins anew with fresh vigor; for all the spirits he is driving before him seem to him as Fata Morgana; ugly masks in fact, if he can but make them turn about, but he laughs that they seem to others such dainty Ariels.  He puts out his chin sometimes till it looks like the beak of a bird, and his eyes flash bright instinctive meanings like Jove’s bird; yet he is not calm and grand enough for the eagle:  he is more like the falcon, and yet not of gentle blood enough for that either.  He is not exactly like anything but himself, and therefore you cannot see him without the most hearty refreshment and goodwill, for he is original, rich, and strong enough to afford a thousand faults; one expects some wild land in a rich kingdom.  His talk, like his books, is full of pictures, his critical strokes masterly; allow for his point of view, and his survey is admirable.  He is a large subject; I cannot speak more nor wiselier of him now, nor needs it; his works are true, to blame and praise him, the Siegfried of England, great and powerful, if not quite invulnerable, and of a might rather to destroy evil than legislate for good.  At all events, he seems to be what Destiny intended, and represents fully a certain side; so we make no remonstrance as to his being and proceeding for himself, though we sometimes must for us.

* * * * *

=_Oliver Wendell Holmes, 1809-._= (Manual, p. 520.)

From “The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table.”

=_211._= CONSEQUENCES OF EXPOSING AN OLD ERROR.

Did you never, in walking in the fields, come across a large flat stone which had lain, nobody knows how long, just where you found it, with the grass forming a little hedge, as it were, all round it, close to its edges,—­and have you not, in obedience to a kind of feeling that told you it had been lying there long enough, insinuated your stick, or your foot, or your fingers, under its edge, and turned it over as a housewife turns a cake, when she says to herself, “It’s done brown enough by this time?” What an odd revelation, and what an unforeseen and unpleasant surprise to a small community, the very existence of which you had not suspected, until the sudden dismay and scattering among its members produced by your turning the old stone over!  Blades of grass flattened down, colorless, matted together, as if they had been bleached and ironed; hideous crawling creatures, some of them coleopterous or horny-shelled,—­turtle-bugs one wants to call them; some of them softer but cunningly spread out and compressed like Lepine watches; (Nature never loses a crack or a crevice, mind you, or a joint