expression which last evening the clown dropped as he trudged homeward to supper, the light of the setting sun on his face, expands before me to a dozen pages.  The coffin of the pauper, which to-day I saw carried carelessly along, is as good a subject as the funeral procession of an emperor.  Craped drum and banner add nothing to death; penury and disrespect take nothing away.  Incontinently my thought moves like a slow-paced hearse with sable nodding plumes.  Two rustic lovers, whispering between the darkening hedges, is as potent to project my mind into the tender passion as if I had seen Romeo touch the cheek of Juliet in the moon-light garden.  Seeing a curly-headed child asleep in the sunshine before a cottage door is sufficient excuse for a discourse on childhood; quite as good as if I had seen infant Cain asleep in the lap of Eve with Adam looking on.  A lark cannot rise to heaven without raising as many thoughts as there are notes in its song.  Dawn cannot pour its white light on my village without starting from their dim lair a hundred reminiscences; nor can sunset burn above yonder trees in the west without attracting to itself the melancholy of a lifetime.  When spring unfolds her green leaves I would be provoked to indite an essay on hope and youth, were it not that it is already writ in the carols of the birds; and I might be tempted in autumn to improve the occasion, were it not for the rustle of the withered leaves as I walk through the woods.  Compared with that simple music, the saddest-cadenced words have but a shallow meaning.

The essayist who feeds his thoughts upon the segment of the world which surrounds him cannot avoid being an egotist; but then his egotism is not unpleasing.  If he be without taint of boastfulness, of self-sufficiency, of hungry vanity, the world will not press the charge home.  If a man discourses continually of his wines, his plate, his titled acquaintances, the number and quality of his horses, his men-servants and maid-servants, he must discourse very skilfully indeed if he escapes being called a coxcomb.  If a man speaks of death—­tells you that the idea of it continually haunts him, that he has the most insatiable curiosity as to death and dying, that his thought mines in churchyards like a “demon-mole”—­no one is specially offended, and that this is a dull fellow is the hardest thing likely to be said of him.  Only, the egotism that overcrows you is offensive, that exalts trifles and takes pleasure in them, that suggests superiority in matters of equipage and furniture; and the egotism is offensive, because it runs counter to and jostles your self-complacency.  The egotism which rises no higher than the grave is of a solitary and a hermit kind—­it crosses no man’s path, it disturbs no man’s amour propre.  You may offend a man if you say you are as rich as he, as wise as he, as handsome as he.  You offend no man if you tell him that, like him, you have to die.  The king, in his crown and coronation robes,