73. It is good to read of that kindness and humbleness of St. Francis of Assisi, who spoke never to bird, nor to cicada, nor even to wolf and beasts of prey, but as his brother;--and so we find are moved the minds of all good and mighty men, as in the lesson that we have from the 'Mariner' of Coleridge, and yet more truly and rightly taught in the 'Hartleap Well'-- "Never to blend our pleasure or our pride With sorrow of the meanest thing that feels,"-- and again in the 'White Doe' of Rylstone, with the added teaching, that anguish of our own "Is tempered and allayed by sympathies Aloft ascending, and descending deep, Even to the inferior kinds;"-- so that I know not of anything more destructive of the whole theoretic faculty, not to say of the Christian character and human intellect,[31] than those accursed sports in which man makes of himself cat, tiger, leopard, and alligator in one; and gathers into one continuance of cruelty, for his amusement, all the devices that brutes sparingly and at intervals use against each other for their necessities. [31] I am more and more grieved, as I re-read this and other portions of the most affected and weak of all my books, (written in a moulting time of my life,)--the second volume of 'Modern Painters,'--at its morbid violence of passion and narrowness of thought. Yet, at heart, the book was, like my others, honest; and in substance it is mostly good; but all boiled to rags. 74. He who loves not God, nor his brother, cannot love the grass beneath his feet, nor the creatures which live not for his uses, filling those spaces in the universe which he needs not: while, on the other hand, none can love God, nor his human brother, without loving all things which his Father loves; nor without looking upon them every one as in that respect his brethren also, and perhaps worthier than he, if, in the under concords they have to fill, their part is touched more truly.[32] [32] Morbidly Franciscan, again! and I am really compelled to leave out one little bit my friend liked,--as all kindly and hopeful women would,--about everything turning out right, and being to some good end. For we have no business whatever with the ends of things, but with their beings; and their beings are often entirely bad. 75. Things may always be seen truly by candid people, though never _completely_. No human capacity ever yet saw the whole of a thing; but we may see more and more of it the longer we look. Every individual temper will see something different in it; but supposing the tempers honest, all the differences are there. Every advance in our acuteness of perception will show us something new; but the old and first-discerned thing will still be there, not falsified, only modified and enriched by the new perceptions, becoming continually more beautiful in its harmony with them, and more approved as a part of the infinite truth. SECTION IX. MORALITIES.