with wine and roses to the brim, so that the wine runs over and fills the house with perfume; who inspire us with courtesy; who unloose our tongues, and we speak; who anoint our eyes, and we see?  We say things we never thought to have said; for once, our walls of habitual reserve vanished, and left us at large; we were children playing with children in a wide field of flowers.  Steep us, we cried, in these influences, for days, for weeks, and we shall be sunny poets, and will write out in many-colored words the romance that you are.  Was it Hafiz[445] or Firdousi[446] that said of his Persian Lilla, “She was an elemental force, and astonished me by her amount of life, when I saw her day after day radiating, every instant, redundant joy and grace on all around her.[447] She was a solvent powerful to reconcile all heterogeneous persons into one society; like air or water, an element of such a great range of affinities, that it combines readily with a thousand substances.  Where she is present, all others will be more than they are wont.  She was a unit and whole, so that whatsoever she did, became her.  She had too much sympathy and desire to please, than that you could say, her manners were marked with dignity, yet no princess could surpass her clear and erect demeanor on each occasion.  She did not study the Persian grammar, nor the books of the seven poets, but all the poems of the seven seemed to be written upon her.  For, though the bias of her nature was not to thought, but to sympathy, yet was she so perfect in her own nature, as to meet intellectual persons by the fullness of her heart, warming them by her sentiments; believing, as she did, that by dealing nobly with all, all would show themselves noble.”

21.  I know that this Byzantine[448] pile of chivalry of Fashion, which seems so fair and picturesque to those who look at the contemporary facts for science or for entertainment, is not equally pleasant to all spectators.  The constitution of our society makes it a giant’s castle to the ambitious youth who have not found their names enrolled in its Golden Book,[449] and whom it has excluded from its coveted honors and privileges.  They have yet to learn that its seeming grandeur is shadowy and relative:  it is great by their allowance:  its proudest gates will fly open at the approach of their courage and virtue.  For the present distress, however, of those who are predisposed to suffer from the tyrannies of this caprice, there are easy remedies.  To remove your residence a couple of miles, or at most four, will commonly relieve the most extreme susceptibility.  For, the advantages which fashion values are plants which thrive in very confined localities, in a few streets, namely.  Out of this precinct, they go for nothing; are of no use in the farm, in the forest, in the market, in war, in the nuptial society, in the literary or scientific circle, at sea, in friendship, in the heaven of thought or virtue.