CHAPTER II. HUMAN NATURE 55 CHAPTER III. WOMAN 84 CHAPTER IV. CHILDREN 105 CHAPTER V. EDUCATION 118 CHAPTER VI. NATURE 134 CHAPTER VII. LITERATURE AND ART 158 CHAPTER VIII. NEW ENGLAND LIFE 171 CHAPTER IX. MISCELLANEOUS 188 FLOWERS AND FRUIT. CHAPTER I. THE INNER LIFE. THE MINISTER’S WOOING. [Sidenote: Sympathy.] When we feel a thing ourselves, we can see very quick the same in others. * * * * * [Sidenote: Self-deception.] When a finely constituted nature wishes to go into baseness, it has first to bribe itself. Evil is never embraced, undisguised, as evil, but under some fiction which the mind accepts, and with which it has the singular power of blinding itself in the face of daylight. The power of imposing on one’s self is an essential preliminary to imposing on others. The man first argues himself down, and then he is ready to put the whole weight of his nature to deceiving others. * * * * * [Sidenote: Soul-communion.] Perhaps it is so, that souls once intimately related have ever after this a strange power of affecting each other,—a power that neither absence nor death can annul. How else can we interpret those mysterious hours in which the power of departed love seems to overshadow us, making our souls vital with such longings, with such wild throbbings, with such unutterable sighings, that a little more might burst the mortal bond? Is it not deep calling unto deep? the free soul singing outside the cage to her mate beating against the bars within? * * * * * [Sidenote: Soul-absorption.] The greatest moral effects are like those of music,—not wrought out by sharp-sided intellectual propositions, but melted in by a divine fusion, by words that have mysterious, indefinite fulness of meaning, made living by sweet voices, which seem to be the out-throbbings of angelic hearts. So one verse in the Bible read by a mother in some hour of tender prayer has a significance deeper and higher than the most elaborate of sermons, the most acute of arguments. * * * * * [Sidenote: Restrictions of the body on the soul.]