All this finished science of illusion is like an east wind to the confidences of the shy, and if they stay within its range they are blighted before their hearts have time to unfold. They long for a less biting air, for vernal hours in sheltered dells, where without sheaths and unguarded the hearts of flowers lie open to their neighbours and to heaven. There was once a simple day when religion set hearts interflowing, but now it can melt them only within the precincts; the fire which is carried from the altar is dead at the church door. The brotherliness of those early days is indeed often found in humble walks of life, but these we cannot continually tread, because our intellectual and artistic tastes find there no sufficient nurture. Among the cultured a cold convention often reigns, behind which only a more persistent nature than ours can pass. Unless, therefore, we find our way into some circle of gentle scholars or lovers of the beautiful quite simple in their tastes, a thing possible but not often granted by a niggard fortune, we are perforce thrown back upon our own company, and move towards the grave alone. For this we accuse none; nothing is more at fault than our own constitution. But to us society is a school of dames, who are not to be blamed if amid the crowd that clamours for their teaching, they find no time for the backward scholar. We are the dunces of the school, and are dismissed without learning the accomplishments set forth upon the prospectus. That is why in our northern streets so many seeming hats are cowls. In England the loss of congenial intercourse is perhaps more certain than in other lands. For through his national reserve the highly-cultured Englishman has a cold perfection of good breeding to which heartiness is vulgarity; he emanates intimidation, and in courtesy is rather studious than spontaneous, seldom genial but in an ancient friendship. If you knew him to the concealed heart, and were suffered to assay the fine metal beneath this polished surface, you would win a golden friendship; but only on a desert island would he permit the operation. To the shy who may encumber his path his bearing seems marked by an indifference which they magnify into aversion, and are thereby the worse confounded. In a land where such convention reigns they go through life like persons afflicted with a partial deafness; between them and the happier world there is as it were a crystalline wall which the pleasant low voices of confidence can never traverse.