hearts would you dare to trust?

Alas, the rather good eyes must go so often with the disastrous chin,
the mouth succeed where the nose fails, the expansive impulse be checked
by the narrow habit, the little gleam of gold be lost in the clay.

Preponderant charm does not crowd into chapels or anywhere else to be
minted, it is busy on some vantage height of its own, impressing its own
image; and it is with minds maimed by the cruel machinery of life,
natures stunted and starved by adverse and innutritive condition, that
the artist in man must be satisfied. With what pathetic little flashes
of faculty, what fleeting and illusory glimpses of insight, what waifs
and strays of attractiveness, must he work and be happy, and with what
a thankfulness that the tenth rate is not twentieth or thirtieth!

Then, too, how often must the intractible material be impressed again
and again and again before it begins to wear the first trace of your
image. Once a poet has impressed himself with mastery upon words, the
impression remains for ever, the words do not disperse in idle crowds
when he has done speaking to them, never again to reassemble in a like
combination; whereas the greatest oratorical mover of men is doomed,
even after his most electrical self-impression, to see his image, as
soon as taken, fade away, with a shuffle of escaping feet and a scramble
for hats and cloaks. It was a masterpiece; but with the last touch, see,
the colours are flying in a hundred directions, and the very canvas
itself is off in a thousand threads of hurried disintegration!

But all this, of course, has to do entirely with the poetry of the
ministerial life; prosaic even as preaching and praying to the New
Zioners may sound, there was yet a drearier prose. For these artistic