Much, too, of the spirit of time is lost to us because we will not let the sun rule the day.  He would see to it that our hours were various; but we have preferred to his various face the plain face of a clock, and the lights without vicissitudes of our nights without seasons.

ADDRESSES

Not free from some ignominious attendance upon the opinion of the world is he who too consciously withdraws his affairs from its judgements.  He is indebted to “the public.”  He is at least indebted to it for the fact that there is, yonder, without, a public.  Lacking this excluded multitude his fastidiousness would have no subject, and his singularity no contrast.  He would, in his grosser moods, have nothing to refuse, and nothing, in his finer, to ignore.

He, at any rate, is one, and the rest are numerous.  They minister to him popular errors.  But if they are nothing else in regard to himself, they are many.  If he must have distinction, it is there on easy terms—­he is one.

Well for him if he does not contract the heavier debt shouldered by the man who owes to the unknown, un-named, and uncounted his pleasure in their conjectured or implicit envy; who conceives the jealousy they may have covertly to endure, enjoys it, and thus silently begins and ends within his own morosity the story of his base advantage.

Vanity has indignity as its underside.  And how shall even the pleasure in beauty be altogether without it?  For since beauty, like other human things, is comparative, how shall the praise, or the admiration, thereof be free from (at least) some reference to the unbeautiful?  Or from some allusion to the less beautiful?  Yet this, if inevitable, is little; it may be negligible.  The triumph of beauty is all but innocent.  It is where no beauty is in question that lurks the unconfessed appeal to envy.  That appeal is not an appeal to admiration—­it lacks what is the genial part of egoism.  For who, except perhaps a recent writer of articles on society in America, really admires a man for living in the approved part of Boston?

The vanity of addresses is as frequent with us as on the western side of the Atlantic.  It is a vanity without that single apology for vanity—­gaiety of heart.  The first things that are, in London, sacrificed to it are the beautiful day and the facing of the sky.  There are some amongst us whose wives have constrained them to dwell underground for love of an address.  Modern and foolish is that contempt for daylight.  To the simple, day is beautiful; and “beautiful as day” a happy proverb.

Over all colour, flesh, aspect, surface, manifestation of vitality, dwells one certain dominance.  And if One, vigilant for the dues of His vicegerent, should ask us whose is the image and superscription?  We reply, The Sun’s.

The London air shortens and clips those beams, and yet leaves daylight the finest thing we know.  Beauty of artificial lights is in our streets at night, but their chief beauty is when, just before night, they adorn the day.  The late daylight honours them when it so easily and sweetly subdues and overcomes them, giving to the electric lamp, to the taper, to the hearth fire, and to the spark, a loveliness not their own.