Yes, surely the true way of contemplating these undistinguished masses of humanity, this ’h’-dropping, garlic-eating, child-begetting bourgeois, is Shakespeare’s, Dickens’, Whitman’s way—­through the eye of a gentle sympathetic beholder—­one who understands Nature’s trick of hiding her most precious things beneath rough husks and in rank and bearded envelopes—­and not through the eye-glass of the new critic.

For these undistinguished people are, after all, alive as their critics are not.  They are, indeed, the only people who may properly be said to be alive, dreaming and building while the superior person stands by cogitating sarcasms on their swink’d and dusty appearances.  More of the true spirit of romantic existence goes to the opening of a little grocer’s shop in a back street in Whitechapel than to all the fine marriages at St. George’s, Hanover Square, in a year.  But, of course, all depends on the eye of the beholder.

TRANSFERABLE LIVES

I sometimes have a fancy to speculate how, supposing the matter still undecided, I would like to spend my life.  Often I feel how good it would be to give it in service to one of my six dear friends:  just to offer it to them as so much capital, for whatever it may be worth.  In pondering the fancy, I need hardly say that I do not assess myself at any extravagant value.  I but venture to think that the devotion of one human creature, however humble, throughout a lifetime, is not a despicable offering.  To use me as they would, to fetch and carry with me, to draw on me for whatever force resides in me, as they would on a bank account, to the last penny, to use my brains for their plans, my heart for their love, my blood for added length of days:  and thus be so much the more true in their love, the more prosperous in their business, the more buoyant in their health—­by the addition of me.

But then embarrassment comes upon me.  Which of my friends do I love the most?  To whose account of the six would I fain be credited?  Then again I think of the ten thousand virgins who go mateless about the world, sweet women, with hearts like hidden treasure, awaiting the ‘Prince’s kiss’ that never comes; virgin mothers, whose bosoms shall never know the light warm touch of baby-hands: 

                      ’Pale primroses
    That die unmarried, ere they can behold
    Bright Phoebus in his strength.’

How often one sees such a one in train or omnibus, her eyes, may be, spilling the precious spikenard of their maternal love on some happier woman’s child.  I noticed one of them withering on the stalk on my way to town this morning.  She was, I surmised, nearly twenty-eight, she carried a roll of music, and I had a strong impression that she was the sole support of an invalid mother.  I could hardly resist suggesting to one of my men companions what a good wife she was longing to make, what a Sleeping Beauty she was, waiting for the marital kiss that would set all the sweet bells of her nature a-chime.  I had the greatest difficulty in preventing myself from leaning over to her, and putting it to her in this way—­