Material good has its tax, and if it came without desert or sweat, has no root in me, and the next wind will blow it away.  But all the good of nature is the soul’s, and may be had, if paid for in nature’s lawful coin, that is, by labor which the heart and the head allow.  I no longer wish to meet a good I do not earn; for example, to find a pot of buried gold, knowing that it brings with it new burdens.  I do not wish more external goods,—­neither possessions, nor honors, nor powers, nor persons.  The gain is apparent; the tax is certain.  But there is no tax on the knowledge that the compensation exists, and that it is not desirable to dig up treasure.  Herein I rejoice with a serene eternal peace.  I contract the boundaries of possible mischief.  I learn the wisdom of St. Bernard,[141]—­“Nothing can, work me damage except myself; the harm, that I sustain I carry about with me, and never am a real sufferer but by my own fault.”

In the nature of the soul is the compensation for the inequalities of condition.  The radical tragedy of nature seems to be the distinction of More and Less.  How can Less not feel the pain; how not feel indignation or malevolence towards More?  Look at those who have less faculty, and one feels sad, and knows not well what to make of it.  He almost shuns their eye; he fears they will upbraid God.  What should they do?  It seems a great injustice.  But see the facts nearly, and these mountainous inequalities vanish.  Love reduces them, as the sun melts the iceberg in the sea.  The heart and soul of all men being one, this bitterness of His and Mine ceases.  His is mine.  I am my brother, and my brother is me.  If I feel overshadowed and outdone by great neighbors, I can yet love; I can still receive; and he that loveth maketh his own the grandeur he loves.  Thereby I make the discovery that my brother is my guardian, acting for me with the friendliest designs, and the estate I so admired and envied is my own.  It is the nature of the soul to appropriate all things.  Jesus[142] and Shakespeare are fragments of the soul, and by love I conquer and incorporate them in my own conscious domain.  His[143] virtue,—­is not that mine?  His wit,—­if it cannot be made mine, it is not wit.

Such, also, is the natural history of calamity.  The changes which break up at short intervals the prosperity of men are advertisements of a nature whose law is growth.  Every soul is by this intrinsic necessity quitting its whole system of things, its friends, and home, and laws, and faith, as the shellfish crawls out of its beautiful but stony case, because it no longer admits of its growth, and slowly forms a new house.  In proportion to the vigor of the individual, these revolutions are frequent, until in some happier mind they are incessant, and all worldly relations hang very loosely about him, becoming, as it were, a transparent fluid membrane through which the living form is seen, and not, as in most men,