and you discern no essential difference. "Water's water," you
say, with your broad, stupid generalization, and go oozing along
contentedly through peat-bogs and meadow-ditches, mounting,
perhaps, in moments of inspiration, to the moderate sublimity
of a cranberry-meadow, but subsiding with entire satisfaction
into a muck-puddle: and all the while the little brook that
you patronize when you are full-fed, and snub when you are
hungry, and look upon always,--the little brook is singing its
own melody through grove and orchard and sweet wild-wood,--
singing with the birds and the blooms songs that you cannot
hear; but they are heard by the silent stars, singing on and on
into a broader and deeper destiny, till it pours, one day, its
last earthly note, and becomes forevermore the unutterable sea.

And you are nothing but a ditch.

No, my friend, Lucy will drive with you, and to talk to you,
and sing your songs; she will take care of you, and pray for
you, and cry when you go to the war; if she is not your
daughter or your sister, she will, perhaps, in a moment of
weakness or insanity, marry you; she will be a faithful wife,
and float you to the end; but if you wish to be her love, her
hero, her ideal, her delight, her spontaneity, her utter rest
and ultimatum, you must attune your soul to fine issues,--you
must bring out the angel in you, and keep the brute under.
It is not that you shall stop making shoes, and begin to write
poetry. That is just as much discrimination as you have. Tell
you to be gentle, and you think we will have you dissolve into
milk-and-water; tell you to be polite, and you infer hypocrisy;
to be neat, and you leap over into dandyism, fancying all the