to one another and to themselves.  The step in being thus gained, can never be lost, nor can it be re-trod; for neither party will be again what the other wants.  They are no longer fit to interchange mutual influence, for they do not really need it, and if they think they do, it is because they weakly pine after a past pleasure.

’To this inmost circle of relations but few are admitted, because some prejudice or lack of courage has prevented the many from listening to their instincts the first time they manifested themselves.  If the voice is once disregarded it becomes fainter each time, till, at last, it is wholly silenced, and the man lives in this world, a stranger to its real life, deluded like the maniac who fancies he has attained his throne, while in reality he is on a bed of musty straw.  Yet, if the voice finds a listener and servant the first time of speaking, it is encouraged to more and more clearness.  Thus it was with me,—­from no merit of mine, but because I had the good fortune to be free enough to yield to my impressions.  Common ties had not bound me; there were no traditionary notions in my mind; I believed in nothing merely because others believed in it; I had taken no feelings on trust.  Thus my mind was open to their sway.

’This woman came to me, a star from the east, a morning star, and I worshipped her.  She too was elevated by that worship, and her fairest self called out.  To the mind she brought assurance that there was a region congenial with its tendencies and tastes, a region of elegant culture and intercourse, whose object, fulfilled or not, was to gratify the sense of beauty, not the mere utilities of life.  In our relation she was lifted to the top of her being.  She had known many celebrities, had roused to passionate desire many hearts, and became afterwards a wife; but I do not believe she ever more truly realized her best self than towards the lonely child whose heaven she was, whose eye she met, and whose possibilities she predicted.  “He raised me,” said a woman inspired by love, “upon the pedestal of his own high thoughts, and wings came at once, but I did not fly away.  I stood there with downcast eyes worthy of his love, for he had made me so.”

’Thus we do always for those who inspire us to expect from them the best.  That which they are able to be, they become, because we demand it of them.  “We expect the impossible—­and find it.”

’My English friend went across the sea.  She passed into her former life, and into ties that engrossed her days.  But she has never ceased to think of me.  Her thoughts turn forcibly back to the child who was to her all she saw of the really New World.  On the promised coasts she had found only cities, careful men and women, the aims and habits of ordinary life in her own land, without that elegant culture which she, probably, over-estimated, because it was her home.  But in the mind of the child she