the Heavenly bodies were vanquished, and battle's conflagration
had collapsed into cold dark ashes, and the starvation reached
too high a pitch for the poor man.

Howard is not the only benefactor that has worked without money
for us; there have been some more,--and will be, I hope! For the
Destinies are opulent; and send here and there a man into the
world to do work, for which they do not mean to pay him in money.
And they smite him beneficently with sore afflictions, and blight
his world all into grim frozen ruins round him,--and can make a
wandering Exile of their Dante, and not a soft-bedded Podesta of
Florence, if they wish to get a _Divine Comedy_ out of him. Nay
that rather is their way, when they have worthy work for such a
man; they scourge him manifoldly to the due pitch, sometimes
nearly of despair, that he may search desperately for his work,
and find it; they urge him on still with beneficent stripes when
needful, as is constantly the case between whiles; and, in fact,
have privately decided to reward him with beneficent death by and
by, and not with money at all. O my benevolent friend, I honor
Howard very much; but it is on this side idolatry a long way, not
to an infinite, but to a decidedly finite extent! And you,--put
not the modest noble Howard, a truly modest man, to the blush, by
forcing these reflections on us!

Cholera Doctors, hired to dive into black dens of infection and
despair, they, rushing about all day from lane to lane, with
their life in their hand, are found to do their function; which
is a much more rugged one than Howard's. Or what say we, Cholera
Doctors? Ragged losels gathered by beat of drum from the
overcrowded streets of cities, and drilled a little and dressed