pure decency in the place of sham; real flesh; a soul born active, wind-
beaten, but ascending. Honourable will fiction then appear; honourable,
a fount of life, an aid to life, quick with our blood. Why, when you
behold it you love it--and you will not encourage it?--or only when
presented by dead hands? Worse than that alternative dirty drab, your
recurring rose-pink is rebuked by hideous revelations of the filthy foul;
for nature will force her way, and if you try to stifle her by drowning,
she comes up, not the fairest part of her uppermost! Peruse your
Realists--really your castigators for not having yet embraced Philosophy.
As she grows in the flesh when discreetly tended, nature is
unimpeachable, flower-eke, yet not too decoratively a flower; you must
have her with the stem, the thorns, the roots, and the fat bedding of
roses. In this fashion she grew, says historical fiction; thus does she
flourish now, would say the modern transcript, reading the inner as well
as exhibiting the outer.

And how may you know that you have reached to Philosophy? You touch her
skirts when you share her hatred of the sham decent, her derision of
sentimentalism. You are one with her when--but I would not have you a
thousand years older! Get to her, if in no other way, by the sentimental
route:--that very winding path, which again and again brings you round to
the point of original impetus, where you have to be unwound for another
whirl; your point of original impetus being the grossly material, not at
all the spiritual. It is most true that sentimentalism springs from the
former, merely and badly aping the latter,--fine flower, or pinnacle
flame-spire, of sensualism that it is, could it do other? and
accompanying the former it traverses tracts of desert here and there
couching in a garden, catching with one hand at fruits, with another at
colours; imagining a secret ahead, and goaded by an appetite, sustained
by sheer gratifications. Fiddle in harmonics as it may, it will have