It is not the essayist’s duty to inform, to build pathways through metaphysical morasses, to cancel abuses, any more than it is the duty of the poet to do these things.  Incidentally he may do something in that way, just as the poet may, but it is not his duty, and should not be expected of him.  Skylarks are primarily created to sing, although a whole choir of them may be baked in pies and brought to table; they were born to make music, although they may incidentally stay the pangs of vulgar hunger.  The essayist is a kind of poet in prose, and if questioned harshly as to his uses, he might be unable to render a better apology for his existence than a flower might.  The essay should be pure literature as the poem is pure literature.  The essayist wears a lance, but he cares more for the sharpness of its point than for the pennon that flutters on it, than for the banner of the captain under whom he serves.  He plays with death as Hamlet plays with Yorick’s skull, and he reads the morals—­strangely stern, often, for such fragrant lodging—­which are folded up in the bosoms of roses.  He has no pride, and is deficient in a sense of the congruity and fitness of things.  He lifts a pebble from the ground, and puts it aside more carefully than any gem; and on a nail in a cottage-door he will hang the mantle of his thought, heavily brocaded with the gold of rhetoric.  He finds his way into the Elysian fields through portals the most shabby and commonplace.

The essayist plays with his subject, now whimsical, now in grave, now in melancholy mood.  He lies upon the idle grassy bank, like Jacques, letting the world flow past him, and from this thing and the other he extracts his mirth and his moralities.  His main gift is an eye to discover the suggestiveness of common things; to find a sermon in the most unpromising texts.  Beyond the vital hint, the first step, his discourses are not beholden to their titles.  Let him take up the most trivial subject, and it will lead him away to the great questions over which the serious imagination loves to brood,—­fortune, mutability, death,—­just as inevitably as the runnel, trickling among the summer hills, on which sheep are bleating, leads you to the sea; or as, turning down the first street you come to in the city, you are led finally, albeit by many an intricacy, out into the open country, with its waste places and its woods, where you are lost in a sense of strangeness and solitariness.  The world is to the meditative man what the mulberry plant is to the silkworm.  The essay-writer has no lack of subject-matter.  He has the day that is passing over his head; and, if unsatisfied with that, he has the world’s six thousand years to depasture his gay or serious humour upon.  I idle away my time here, and I am finding new subjects every hour.  Everything I see or hear is an essay in bud.  The world is everywhere whispering essays, and one need only be the world’s amanuensis.  The proverbial