quaintly on his otherwise gallant appointments,--an old mantle that
had belonged to his father. Retained, as he tells us, in spite of
its inconvenience, "because it seemed to envelope me in him," it was
the symbol of a hundred natural, perhaps somewhat material, pieties.
Parentage, kinship, relationship through earth,--the touch of that
was everywhere like a caress to him. His fine taste notwithstanding,
he loved, in those long rambles, to partake of homely fare, paying
largely for it. Everywhere it was as if the earth in him turned
kindly to [108] earth. "Under the sun," the sturdy purple thistles,
the blossoming burrs also, were worth knowing. Let us grow together
with you! they seem to say. Himself was one of those whom he thought
"Heaven favoured" in making them die, so naturally, by degrees. "I
shall be blind before I am sensible of the decay of my sight, with
such kindly artifice do the Fatal Sisters entwist our lives. I melt,
and steal away from myself. How variously is it no longer I!" It
was not he who would carry a furry robe at midsummer, because he
might need it in the winter.--"In fine, we must live among the
living, and let the river flow under the bridge without our care,
above all things avoiding fear, that great disturber of reason. The
thing in the world I am most afraid of is fear."

And still, health, the invincible survival of youth, "admonished him
to a better wisdom than years and sickness." Was there anything
better, fairer, than the beautiful light of health? To be in health
was itself the sign, perhaps the essence, of wisdom--a wisdom, rich
in counsels regarding all one's contacts with the earthy side of
existence. And how he could laugh!--at that King of Thrace, for
instance, who had a religion and a god all to himself, which his
subjects might not presume to worship; at that King of Mexico, who
swore at his coronation not only to keep the laws, but also to make