Dreamthorp : $b A book of essays written in the countrySmith, Alexander
General
Dreamthorp : $b A book of essays written in the country
Smith, Alexander
Essays
separated persons, who understand, and can only understand, each other
partially. It is annoying to be put out in our notions of men and
women thus, and to be forced to rearrange them. It is a misfortune to
have to manoeuvre one's heart as a general has to manoeuvre his army.
The globe has been circumnavigated, but no man ever yet has; you may
survey a kingdom and note the result in maps, but all the servants in
the world could not produce a reliable map of the poorest human
personality. And the worst of all this is, that love and friendship
may be the outcome of a certain condition of knowledge; increase the
knowledge, and love and friendship beat their wings and go. Every
man's road in life is marked by the graves of his personal likings.
Intimacy is frequently the road to indifference, and marriage a
parricide. From these accidents to the affections, and from the
efforts to repair them, life has in many a patched and tinkered look.
Love and friendship are the discoveries of ourselves in others, and our
delight in the recognition; and in men, as in books, we only know that,
the parallel of which we have in ourselves. We know only that portion
of the world which we have travelled over; and we are never a whit
wiser than our own experiences. Imagination, the falcon, sits on the
wrist of Experience, the falconer; she can never soar beyond the reach
of his whistle, and when tired she must return to her perch. Our
knowledge is limited by ourselves, and so also are our imaginations.
And so it comes about, that a man measures everything by his own
foot-rule; that if he is ignoble, all the ignobleness that is in the
world looks out upon him, and claims kindred with him; if noble, all
the nobleness in the world does the like. Shakspeare is always the
same height with his reader; and when a thousand Christians subscribe
to one Confession of Faith, hardly to two of them does it mean the same
thing. The world is a great warehouse of raiment, to which every one
has access and is allowed free use; and the remarkable thing is, what
coarse stuffs are often chosen, and how scantily some people are
attired.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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