But also in complacences, nowise so strict as this of the passion, the man of sensibility counts it a delight only to hear a child’s voice fully addressed to him, or to see the beautiful manners of the youth of either sex. When the event is past and remote, how insignificant the greatest compared with the piquancy of the present! To-day at the school examination the professor interrogates Sylvina in the history class about Odoacer and Alaric. Sylvina can’t remember, but suggests that Odoacer was defeated; and the professor tartly replies, “No, he defeated the Romans.” But ’tis plain to the visitor, that ’tis of no importance at all about Odoacer, and ’tis a great deal of importance about Sylvina; and if she says he was defeated, why he had better, a great deal, have been defeated, than give her a moment’s annoy. Odoacer, if there was a particle of the gentleman in him, would have said, Let me be defeated a thousand times. And as our tenderness for youth and beauty gives a new and just importance to their fresh and manifold claims, so the like sensibility gives welcome to all excellence, has eyes and hospitality for merit in corners. An Englishman of marked character and talent, who had brought with him hither one or two friends and a library of mystics, assured me that nobody and nothing of possible interest was left in England,--he had brought all that was alive away. I was forced to reply: “No, next door to you, probably, on the other side of the partition in the same house, was a greater man than any you had seen.” Every man has a history worth knowing, if he could tell it, or if we could draw it from him. Character and wit have their own magnetism. Send a deep man into any town, and he will find another deep man there, unknown hitherto to his neighbors. That is the great happiness of life,--to add to our high acquaintances. The very law of averages might have assured you that there will be in every hundred heads, say ten or five good heads. Morals are generated as the atmosphere is. ’Tis a secret, the genesis of either; but the springs of justice and courage do not fail any more than salt or sulphur springs. The world is always opulent, the oracles are never silent; but the receiver must by a happy temperance be brought to that top of condition, that frolic health, that he can easily take and give these fine communications. Health is the condition of wisdom, and the sign is cheerfulness,--an open and noble temper. There was never poet who had not the heart in the right place. The old trouveur, Pons Capdueil, wrote,-- “Oft have I heard, and deem the witness true, Whom man delights in, God delights in too.”