All this is matter of daily experience with us. We do not, indeed, tire
of old friends. A soul whose wealth we have once recognized must be
ever rich to us. Gold turns not to copper by keeping; and perhaps old
friends are rather like old wine, and can never be too old. Yet who
does not mark in the calendar those days wherein he has met a _new_
rich soul, that has a physiognomy, a grace and expression, peculiarly
its own? Even decided repulsions have also a use. We whet our
conscience on our neighbors' faults, as sober Spartans were made by the
spectacle of drunken Helots;--though he who makes habitual _talk_ about
his neighbors' faults whets his conscience across the edge. If there be
sermons in stones, no less is there blessing in bores and in bullies.
We found one day in the face of a black bear what could not be so well
found in libraries. The creature regarded us attentively, and with
affection rather than malice,--saw simply certain amounts of savory
flesh, useful for the satisfaction of ursine hungers,--and saw nothing
more. It was an incomparable lesson to teach that the world is an
endless series of levels, and that each eye sees what its own altitude
commands; the rest to it is non-extant. _That_ bear was in his natural
covering of hair; his brothers we frequently meet in broadcloth.

Now, as Nature keeps up this inexhaustible variety of individual genius
which individual quickening requires, so on the larger scale is she
ever working and compounding to produce varieties of national genius.
Her aim is the same in both cases,--to enrich the whole by this
electrical and enlivening relation between its parts. And thus an
American man, no copy, but an original, formed in unprecedented moulds,
with his own unborrowed grandeur, his own piquancy and charm, is to be
looked for,--is, indeed, even now to be seen,--on this shore.

Yes, the man we seek is already found, his features rapidly becoming