could not but feel, deserve the fate they find here; the bat
fate: to be killed among the rats as a bird, among the birds as
a rat.... Nay, who knows but it is doubts of the like kind in
your own mind that keep you for a time inactive even now? For
the rest, that you have liberty to choose by your own will
merely, is a great blessing: too rare for those that could use
it so well; nay, often it is difficult to use. But till _ill
health_ of body or of mind warns you that the moving, not the
sitting, position is essential, _sit_ still, contented in
conscience; understanding well that no man, that God only knows
_what_ we are working, and will show it one day; that such and
such a one, who filled the whole Earth with his hammering and
troweling, and would not let men pass for his rubbish, turns out
to have built of mere coagulated froth, and vanishes with his
edifice, traceless, silently, or amid hootings illimitable;
while again that other still man, by the word of his mouth, by
the very look of his face, was scattering influences, as _seeds_
are scattered, "to be found flourishing as a banyan grove after a
thousand years." I beg your pardon for all this preaching, if it
be superfluous impute it to no miserable motive.

Your objections to Goethe are very natural, and even bring you
nearer me: nevertheless, I am by no means sure that it were not
your wisdom, at this moment, to set about learning the German
Language, with a view towards studying _him_ mainly! I do not
assert this; but the truth of it would not surprise me. Believe
me, it is impossible you can be more a Puritan than I; nay, I
often feel as if I were far too much so: but John Knox himself,
could he have seen the peaceable impregnable _fidelity_ of that
man's mind, and how to him also Duty was _infinite,_--Knox would