“Water’s water,” you say, with your broad, stupid generalization, and go oozing along contentedly through peat-bogs and meadow-ditches, mounting, perhaps, in moments of inspiration, to the moderate sublimity of a cranberry-meadow, but subsiding with entire satisfaction into a muck-puddle; and all the while the little brook that you patronize when you are full-fed, and snub when you are hungry, and look down upon always,—­the little brook is singing its own melody through grove and orchard and sweet wild-wood,—­singing with the birds and the blooms songs that you cannot hear; but they are heard by the silent stars, singing on and on into a broader and deeper destiny, till it pours, one day, its last earthly note, and becomes forevermore the unutterable sea.

And you are nothing but a ditch.

No, my friend, Lucy will drive with you, and talk to you, and sing your songs; she will take care of you, and pray for you, and cry when you go to the war; if she is not your daughter or your sister, she will, perhaps, in a moment of weakness or insanity, marry you; she will be a faithful wife, and float you to the end; but if you wish to be her love, her hero, her ideal, her delight, her spontaneity, her utter rest and ultimatum, you must attune your soul to fine issues,—­you must bring out the angel in you, and keep the brute under.  It is not that you shall stop making shoes, and begin to write poetry.  That is just as much discrimination as you have.  Tell you to be gentle, and you think we want you to dissolve into milk-and-water; tell you to be polite, and you infer hypocrisy; to be neat, and you leap over into dandyism, fancying all the while that bluster is manliness.  No, Sir.  You may make shoes, you may run engines, you may carry coals; you may blow the huntsman’s horn, hurl the base-ball, follow the plough, smite the anvil; your face may be brown, your veins knotted, your hands grimed; and yet you may be a hero.  And, on the other hand, you may write verses and be a clown.  It is not necessary to feed on ambrosia in order to become divine; nor shall one be accursed, though he drink of the ninefold Styx.  The Israelites ate angels’ food in the wilderness, and remained stiff-necked and uncircumcised in heart and ears.  The white water-lily feeds on slime, and unfolds a heavenly glory.  Come as the June morning comes.  It has not picked its way daintily, passing only among the roses.  It has breathed up the whole earth.  It has blown through the fields and the barn-yards and all the common places of the land.  It has shrunk from nothing.  Its purity has breasted and overborne all things, and so mingled and harmonized all that it sweeps around your forehead and sinks into your heart as soft and sweet and pure as the fragrancy of Paradise.  So come you, rough from the world’s rough work, with all out-door airs blowing around you, and all your earth-smells clinging to you, but with a fine inward grace, so strong, so sweet, so salubrious that it meets and masters all things, blending every faintest or foulest odor of earthliness into the grateful incense of a pure and lofty life.