Love and friendship are the discoveries of ourselves in others, and our delight in the recognition; and in men, as in books, we only know that, the parallel of which we have in ourselves.  We know only that portion of the world which we have travelled over; and we are never a whit wiser than our own experiences.  Imagination, the falcon, sits on the wrist of Experience, the falconer; she can never soar beyond the reach of his whistle, and when tired she must return to her perch.  Our knowledge is limited by ourselves, and so also are our imaginations.  And so it comes about, that a man measures everything by his own foot-rule; that if he is ignoble, all the ignobleness that is in the world looks out upon him, and claims kindred with him; if noble, all the nobleness in the world does the like.  Shakspeare is always the same height with his reader; and when a thousand Christians subscribe to one Confession of Faith, hardly to two of them does it mean the same thing.  The world is a great warehouse of raiment, to which every one has access and is allowed free use; and the remarkable thing is, what coarse stuffs are often chosen, and how scantily some people are attired.

We never get quit of ourselves.  While I am writing, the spring is outside, and this season of the year touches my spirit always with a sense of newness, of strangeness, of resurrection.  It shoots boyhood again into the blood of middle age.  That tender greening of the black bough and the red field,—­that coming again of the new-old flowers,—­that re-birth of love in all the family of birds, with cooings, and caressings, and building of nests in wood and brake,—­that strange glory of sunshine in the air,—­that stirring of life in the green mould, making even churchyards beautiful,—­seems like the creation of a new world.  And yet—­and yet, even with the lamb in the sunny field, the lark mile-high in the blue, Spring has her melancholy side, and bears a sadder burden to the heart than Autumn, preaching of decay with all his painted woods.  For the flowers that make sweet the moist places in the forest are not the same that bloomed the year before.  Another lark sings above the furrowed field.  Nature rolls on in her eternal course, repeating her tale of spring, summer, autumn, winter; but life in man and beast is transitory, and other living creatures take their places.  It is quite certain that one or other of the next twenty springs will come unseen by me, will awake no throb of transport in my veins.  But will it be less bright on that account?  Will the lamb be saddened in the field?  Will the lark be less happy in the air?  The sunshine will draw the daisy from the mound under which I sleep, as carelessly as she draws the cowslip from the meadow by the riverside.  The seasons have no ruth, no compunction.  They care not for our petty lives.  The light falls sweetly on graveyards, and on brown labourers among the hay-swaths.  Were the world depopulated to-morrow, next spring