as baleful as if selfishness really existed.  The peculiar temptation which besets men of letters, the curious playing with thought and emotion, the tendency to analyse and take everything to pieces, has two results, and neither aids his happiness nor even his literary success.  On the one hand, and in relation to the social relations, it gives him somewhat of an icy aspect, and so breaks the spring and eagerness of affectionate response.  For the best affection is shy, reticent, undemonstrative, and needs to be drawn out by its like.  If unrecognised, like an acquaintance on the street, it passes by, making no sign, and is for the time being a stranger.  On the other hand, the desire to say a fine thing about a phenomenon, whether natural or moral, prevents a man from reaching the inmost core of the phenomenon.  Entrance into these matters will never be obtained by the most sedulous seeking.  The man who has found an entrance cannot tell how he came there, and he will never find his way back again by the same road.  From this law arises all the dreary conceits and artifices of the poets; it is through the operation of the same law that many of our simple songs and ballads are inexpressibly affecting, because in them there is no consciousness of authorship; emotion and utterance are twin born, consentaneous—­like sorrow and tears, a blow and its pain, a kiss and its thrill.  When a man is happy, every effort to express his happiness mars its completeness.  I am not happy at all unless I am happier than I know.  When the tide is full there is silence in channel and creek.  The silence of the lover when he clasps the maid is better than the passionate murmur of the song which celebrates her charms.  If to be near the rose makes the nightingale tipsy with delight, what must it be to be the rose herself?  One feeling of the “wild joys of living—­the leaping from rock to rock,” is better than the “muscular-Christianity” literature which our time has produced.  I am afraid that the profession of letters interferes with the elemental feelings of life; and I am afraid, too, that in the majority of cases this interference is not justified by its results.  The entireness and simplicity of life is flawed by the intrusion of an inquisitive element, and this inquisitive element never yet found anything which was much worth the finding.  Men live by the primal energies of love, faith, imagination; and happily it is not given to every one to live, in the pecuniary sense, by the artistic utilisation and sale of these.  You cannot make ideas; they must come unsought if they come at all.

  “From pastoral graves extracting thoughts divine”

is a profitable occupation enough, if you stumble on the little churchyard covered over with silence, and folded among the hills.  If you go to the churchyard with intent to procure thought, as you go into the woods to gather anemones, you are wasting your time.  Thoughts must come naturally, like wild flowers; they cannot be forced in a hot-bed—­even although aided by the leaf-mould of your past—­like exotics.  And it is the misfortune of men of letters of our day that they cannot afford to wait for this natural flowering of thought, but are driven to the forcing process, with the results which were to be expected.