In such mood come swift dreams of wealth,—­not of mere accumulation, but of the splendor and parade which in our Western world are, alas! its chiefest attractions.  You grow observant of markets, and estimate percentages.  You fondle some speculation in your thought, until it grows into a gigantic scheme of profit; and if the venture prove successful, you follow the tide tremulously, until some sudden reverse throws you back upon the resources of your professional employ.

But again as you see this and that one wearing the blazonry which wealth wins, and which the man of the world is sure to covet,—­your weak soul glows again with the impassioned desire, and you hunger, with brute appetite and bestial eye, for riches.  You see the mania around you, and it is relieved of odium by the community of error.  You consult some gray old veteran in the war of gold, scarred with wounds, and crowned with honors, and watch eagerly for the words and the ways which have won him wealth.

Your fingers tingle with mad expectancies; your eyes roam, lost in estimates.  Your note-book shows long lines of figures.  Your reading of the news centres in the stock-list.  Your brow grows cramped with the fever of anxiety.  Through whole church-hours your dreams range over the shadowy transactions of the week or the month to come.

Even with old religious habit clinging fast to your soul, you dream now only of nice conformity, comfortable faith, high respectability; there lies very little in you of that noble consciousness of Duty performed,—­of living up to the Life that is in you,—­of grasping boldly and stoutly at those chains of Love which the Infinite Power has lowered to our reach.  You do not dream of being, but of seeming.  You spill the real essence, and clutch at the vial which has only a label of Truth.  Great and holy thoughts of the Future,—­shadowy, yet bold conceptions of the Infinite,—­float past you dimly, and your hold is never strong enough to grapple them to you.  They fly, like eagles, too near the sun; and there lies game below for your vulture beak to feed upon.

[Great thoughts belong only and truly to him whose mind can hold them.  No matter who first puts them in words, if they come to a soul and fill it, they belong to it,—­whether they floated on the voice of others, or on the wings of silence and the night.]

To be up with the fashion of the time, to be ignorant of plain things and people, and to be knowing in brilliancies, is a kind of Pelhamism that is very apt to overtake one in the first blush of manhood.  To hold a fair place in the after-dinner table-talk, to meet distinction as a familiarity, to wear salon honors with aplomb, to know affection so far as to wield it into grace of language, are all splendid achievements with a man of the world.  Instruction is caught without asking it; and no ignorance so shames as ignorance of those forms by which natural impulse is subdued to the tone of civilian habit.  You conceal what tells of the man, and cover it with what smacks of the roue.