there have been plenty of young heroes, of middle stature and feeble beards, who have felt quite sure they could never love anything more insignificant than a Diana, and yet have found themselves in middle life happily settled with a wife who waddles.  Yes!  Thank God; human feeling is like the mighty rivers that bless the earth:  it does not wait for beauty—­it flows with resistless force and brings beauty with it.

All honour and reverence to the divine beauty of form!  Let us cultivate it to the utmost in men, women, and children—­in our gardens and in our houses.  But let us love that other beauty too, which lies in no secret of proportion, but in the secret of deep human sympathy.  Paint us an angel, if you can, with a floating violet robe, and a face paled by the celestial light; paint us yet oftener a Madonna, turning her mild face upward and opening her arms to welcome the divine glory; but do not impose on us any aesthetic rules which shall banish from the region of Art those old women scraping carrots with their work-worn hands, those heavy clowns taking holiday in a dingy pot-house, those rounded backs and stupid weather-beaten faces that have bent over the spade and done the rough work of the world—­those homes with their tin pans, their brown pitchers, their rough curs, and their clusters of onions.  In this world there are so many of these common coarse people, who have no picturesque sentimental wretchedness!  It is so needful we should remember their existence, else we may happen to leave them quite out of our religion and philosophy and frame lofty theories which only fit a world of extremes.  Therefore, let Art always remind us of them; therefore let us always have men ready to give the loving pains of a life to the faithful representing of commonplace things—­men who see beauty in these commonplace things, and delight in showing how kindly the light of heaven falls on them.  There are few prophets in the world; few sublimely beautiful women; few heroes.  I can’t afford to give all my love and reverence to such rarities:  I want a great deal of those feelings for my every-day fellow-men, especially for the few in the foreground of the great multitude, whose faces I know, whose hands I touch for whom I have to make way with kindly courtesy.  Neither are picturesque lazzaroni or romantic criminals half so frequent as your common labourer, who gets his own bread and eats it vulgarly but creditably with his own pocket-knife.  It is more needful that I should have a fibre of sympathy connecting me with that vulgar citizen who weighs out my sugar in a vilely assorted cravat and waistcoat, than with the handsomest rascal in red scarf and green feathers—­more needful that my heart should swell with loving admiration at some trait of gentle goodness in the faulty people who sit at the same hearth with me, or in the clergyman of my own parish, who is perhaps rather too corpulent and in other respects is not an Oberlin or a Tillotson, than at the deeds of heroes whom I shall never know except by hearsay, or at the sublimest abstract of all clerical graces that was ever conceived by an able novelist.