If one is troubled with a gift for symbolism, it is hard to treat any man
one meets as though he were really a whole man: to treat a lawyer as
though he were anything but a deed of assignment, or a surgeon as if he
were anything more than an operation. As the metropolitan trains load and
unload in a morning, what does one see? Gross upon gross of steel pens, a
few quills, whole carriages full of bricklayers' trowels, and how strange
it seems to watch all the bank-books sorting themselves out from the
motley, and arranging themselves in the first classes, just as we see them
on the shelf in the bank! It is a curious sight. The little shop-girl
there, what is she but a roll of pink ribbon?--nay, she is but
half-a-yard. And the poor infinitesimal porters and guards, how
pathetically small seems their share in the great monosyllable Man,
animalcules in that great social system which, again, is but an animalcule
in the blood of Time. Still more infinitesimal seems the man who is a
subdivision, not of a form of work even, but merely of a form of taste;
the man who collects foreign stamps, say, or book-plates, or arrow-heads,
the connoisseur of a tiny section of one of the lesser schools of Italian
painting, the coral-insect who has devoted his life to a participle,
first-edition men, and all those various bookworms who, without
impropriety be it spoken, are the maggots that breed in the dung of the
great. A certain friend of mine always appears to me in the similitude of
a first edition of one of Mr. Hardy's novels. I have the greatest
difficulty at times to prevent myself forcibly setting him upon my shelf
to complete my set; for, oddly enough, he is the one bit of Hardyana I
lack. In which confession I let the reader into the secret of my own petty
limitations. To have one's horizon bounded by a book-plate, to have no
hope, no wish in life, beyond a first edition! The workers, however
sectional, have some place in the text of the great book of life, but such
mere testers and tasters of existence have hardly a place even in the
gloss, though it be printed in the most microscopic diamond.