or if in the excess of self-importance he receive for himself what is meant for his master, and turn visitors aside into the porter’s lodge.  Beautiful is virgin reserve, and true it is that delicate half-denial reinforces attraction; yet the maiden who carries only No upon her tongue, and only refusal in her ways, shall never wake before dawn on the day of espousal, nor blush beneath her bridal veil, like Morning behind her clouds.  This surface element, we must remember, is not income and resource, but an item of needful, and, so far as needful, graceful and economical expenditure.  Excess of it is wasteful, by causing Life to pay for that which he does not need, by increase of social fiction, and by obstruction of social flow with the fructifications which this brings, not to be spared by any mortal.  Nay, by extreme excess, it may so cut off and sequester a man, that no word or aspect of another soul can reach him; he shall see in mankind only himself, he shall hear in the voices of others only his own echoes.  Many and many a man is there, so housed in his individuality, that it goes, like an impenetrable wall, over eye and ear; and even in the tramp of the centuries he can find hint of nothing save the sound of his own feet.  It is a frequent tragedy,—­but profound as frequent.

One great task, indeed the great task of good-breeding is, accordingly, to induce in this element a delicacy, a translucency, which, without robbing any action or sentiment of the hue it imparts, shall still allow the pure human quality perfectly and perpetually to shine through.  The world has always been charmed with fine manners; and why should it not?  For what are fine manners but this:  to carry your soul on your lip, in your eye, in the palm of your hand, and yet to stand not naked, but clothed upon by your individual quality,—­visible, yet inscrutable,—­given to the hearts of others, yet contained in your own bosom,—­nobly and humanly open, yet duly reticent and secured from invasion? Polished manners often disappoint us; good manners never.

The former may be taken on by indigent souls:  the latter imply a noble and opulent nature.  And wait you not for death, according to the counsel of Solon, to be named happy, if you are permitted fellowship with a man of rich mind, whose individual savor you always finely perceive, and never more than finely,—­who yields you the perpetual sense of community, and never of confusion, with your own spirit.  The happiness is all the greater, if the fellowship be accorded by a mind eminently superior to one’s own; for he, while yet more removed, comes yet nearer, seeming to be that which our own soul may become in some future life, and so yielding us the sense of our own being more deeply and powerfully than it is given by the consciousness in our own bosom.  And going forward to the supreme point of this felicity, we may note that the worshipper, in the ecstasy of his adoration, feels the Highest to be also Nearest,—­more remote than the borders of space and fringes of heaven,—­more intimate with his own being than the air he breathes or the thought be thinks; and of this double sense is the rapture of his adoration, and the joy indeed of every angel, born.