discontented man seems to cry to Heaven, taking the words of the brave Emilia.  But inarticulate has been the voice within the narrow house.  Obviously it never had its poet.  Little elocution is there, little argument or definition, little explicitness.  And yet for every vain capacity we may assuredly count a thousand vain destinies, for every liberal nature a thousand liberal fates.  It is the trouble of the wide house we hear of, clamorous of its disappointments and desires.  The narrow house has no echoes; yet its pathetic shortcoming might well move pity.  On that strait stage is acted a generous tragedy; to that inadequate soul is intrusted an enormous sorrow; a tempest of movement makes its home within that slender nature; and heroic happiness seeks that timorous heart.

We may, indeed, in part know the narrow house by its inarticulateness—­not, certainly, its fewness of words, but its inadequacy and imprecision of speech.  For, doubtless, right language enlarges the soul as no other power or influence may do.  Who, for instance, but trusts more nobly for knowing the full word of his confidence?  Who but loves more penetratingly for possessing the ultimate syllable of his tenderness?  There is a “pledging of the word,” in another sense than the ordinary sense of troth and promise.  The poet pledges his word, his sentence, his verse, and finds therein a peculiar sanction.  And I suppose that even physical pain takes on an edge when it not only enforces a pang but whispers a phrase.  Consciousness and the word are almost as closely united as thought and the word.  Almost—­not quite; in spite of its inexpressive speech, the narrow house is aware and sensitive beyond, as it were, its poor power.

But as to the whole disparity between the destiny and the nature, we know it to be general.  Life is great that is trivially transmitted; love is great that is vulgarly experienced.  Death, too, is a heroic virtue; and to the keeping of us all is death committed:  death, submissive in the indocile, modest in the fatuous, several in the vulgar, secret in the familiar.  It is destructive, because it not only closes but contradicts life.  Unlikely people die.  The one certain thing, it is also the one improbable.  A dreadful paradox is perhaps wrought upon a little nature that is incapable of death and yet is constrained to die.  That is a true destruction, and the thought of it is obscure.

Happy literature corrects all this disproportion by its immortal pause.  It does not bid us follow man or woman to an illogical conclusion.  Mrs. Micawber never does desert Mr. Micawber.  Considering her mental powers, by the way, an illogical conclusion for her would be manifestly inappropriate.  Shakespeare, indeed, having seen a life whole, sees it to an end:  sees it out, and Falstaff dies.  More than Promethean was the audacity that, having kindled, quenched that spark.  But otherwise the grotesque man in literature