Even with old religious habit clinging fast to your soul, you dream now only of nice conformity, comfortable faith, high respectability; there lies very little in you of that noble consciousness of Duty performed,--of living up to the Life that is in you,--of grasping boldly and stoutly at those chains of Love which the Infinite Power has lowered to our reach. You do not dream of being, but of seeming. You spill the real essence, and clutch at the vial which has only a label of Truth. Great and holy thoughts of the Future,--shadowy, yet bold conceptions of the Infinite,--float past you dimly, and your hold is never strong enough to grapple them to you. They fly, like eagles, too near the sun; and there lies game below for your vulture beak to feed upon. [Great thoughts belong only and truly to him whose mind can hold them. No matter who first puts them in words, if they come to a soul and fill it, they belong to it,--whether they floated on the voice of others, or on the wings of silence and the night.] To be up with the fashion of the time, to be ignorant of plain things and people, and to be knowing in brilliancies, is a kind of Pelhamism that is very apt to overtake one in the first blush of manhood. To hold a fair place in the after-dinner table-talk, to meet distinction as a familiarity, to wear _salon_ honors with aplomb, to know affection so far as to wield it into grace of language, are all splendid achievements with a man of the world. Instruction is caught without asking it; and no ignorance so shames as ignorance of those forms by which natural impulse is subdued to the tone of civilian habit. You conceal what tells of the man, and cover it with what smacks of the _roue_. Perhaps under such training, and with a slight memory of early mortification to point your spirit, you affect those gallantries of heart and action which the world calls flirtation. You may study brilliancies of speech to wrap their net around those susceptible hearts whose habit is too _naive_ by nature to wear the leaden covering of custom. You win approaches by artful counterfeit of earnestness, and dash away any _naivete_ of confidence with some brave sophism of the world. A doubt or a distrust piques your pride, and makes attentions wear a humility that wins anew. An indifference piques you more, and throws into your art a counter-indifference,--lit up by bold flashes of feeling,--sparkling with careless brilliancies, and crowned with a triumph of neglect.