The inward life than Nature’s raiment more;
  And the warm sky, the sundown-tinted hill,
    The forest and the lake, seemed dwarfed and dim
  Before the saintly soul, whose human will
      Meekly in the Eternal footsteps trod,
  Making her homely toil and household ways
  An earthly echo of the song of praise
    Swelling from angel lips and harps of seraphim!

INDIVIDUALITY.

At a certain depth, as has already been intimated in our literature, all bosoms communicate, all hearts are one.  Hector and Ajax, in Homer’s great picture, stand face to face, each with advanced foot, with levelled spear, and turgid sinew, eager to kill, while on either side ten thousand slaughterous wishes poise themselves in hot breasts, waiting to fly with the flying weapons; yet, though the combatants seem to surrender themselves wholly to this action, there is in each a profound element that is no party to these hostilities.  It is the pure nature of man.  Ajax is not all Greek, nor is Hector wholly Trojan:  both are also men; and to the extent of their mutual participation in this pure and perpetual element of Manhood, they are more than friends, more than relatives,—­they are of identical spirit.  For there is an imperishable nature of Man, ever and everywhere the same, of which each particular man is a testimony and representation.  As the solid earth underruns the “dissociating sea”—­Oceano dissociabili—­and joins in one all sundered lands, so does this nature dip beneath the dividing parts of our being, and make of all men one simple and inseparable humanity.  In love, in friendship, in true conversation, in all happiness of communion between men, it is this unchangeable substratum or substance of man’s being that is efficient and supreme:  out of divers bosoms, Same calls, and replies to Same with a great joy of self-recognition.  It is only in virtue of this nature that men understand, appreciate, admire, trust each other,—­that books of the earliest times remain true in the latest,—­that society is possible; and he in whom the virtue of it dwells divinely is admitted to the secret confidence of all bosoms, lives in all times, and converses with each soul and age in its own vernacular.  Socrates looked beyond the gates of death for happy communion with Homer and all the great; but already we interchange words with these, whenever we are so sweetly prospered as to become, in some good degree, identical with the absolute nature of man.

Not only, moreover, is this immortal substance of man’s being common and social, but it is so great and venerable that no one can match it with an equal report.  All the epithets by which we would extol it are disgraced by it, as the most brilliant artificial lights become blackness when placed between the eye and the noonday sun.  It is older, it is earlier in existence than the earliest star that shone in heaven; and it will outlive the fixed stars