Genius sees that many an exception is fruit of some larger law, is not imperfection, but uncomprehended perfection.  Is there, then, no imperfection?  We are haunted by such a thought.  We see first a mixed beauty in faces, partly life and partly organization; the body is never symmetrical, deformity is the rule.  But beauty will not be measured by form; the body cannot long occupy good eyes; we begin to look through that, and encounter some courage, generosity, or tenderness, a dawning or dominant light in every countenance.  This is our morning, and the physical form only a low shore over which it breaks.  Beauty is the rule, exceptions melt away.  There is no face in which Raphael cannot see more than I see in any face; the dullest landscape is to Turner a fairer vision than I can find in the world; Byron in his blackguards shows a kind of magnanimity which refreshes the victims of respectability and routine.  The individuality of men is deformity, a departure from the human type; yet this fault makes each necessary to each, founds society, love, and friendship.  So wherever a break appears in the plan, we anticipate a larger purpose, and sound down through the water, certain to find under that also a continuation of land.  Genius first named our system a universe to mark its consistency, and goes on reconciling, showing how creatures and men are made of one stuff and that not so bad.  Let the thing be what it may, press on it a little with the mind, and order begins to ooze.  There is nothing on which we cannot feed with good enough teeth and digestion, for the elements of meat are given also in brick and bark.  Natural objects are explored to their roots in man, and through him in the Cause:  each is what it is in kindness to him, has its soul in his breast, grows out of him as truly as his hair, and the out-world is only a larger body shaped by his needs.  Each thing is a passive man, and personification does no more than justice to the joint-stool and the fence or whatever creature talks and suffers in verse.

What is the meaning of my day and relations?  I suspect an advantage designed for me, but not yet extracted, in marriage and the family-life, in books, in politics, in business, in the garden, in music.  How much of each, as I know them, is chaff? how much is life coming in from the deep by these low doors?  What is society?  An eating and drinking together? a bit of gossip? a volley of jokes?  Do men meet in these exercises, or in hope and humanity?  We are all superior to amusement.  The cowardly host will entertain with fiddlers and cream; then every guest leaves his high desire with his hat, leaves himself behind, and descends to fiddlers and cream.  But men rise to associate; in sinking they separate; and the good host must call us up, not drag us down to his feast.  Goethe knows how to spread the table with portfolios, architecture, music, drawing, tableaux; but a great love, with its inevitable thought, makes even these solvents superfluous.  Goethe