"You know I said of that great and pure society of the dead, that it would allow 'no vain or vulgar person to enter there.' What do you think I meant by a 'vulgar' person? What do you yourselves mean by 'vulgarity'? You will find it a fruitful subject of thought; but, briefly, the essence of all vulgarity lies in want of sensation. Simple and innocent vulgarity is merely an untrained and undeveloped bluntness of body and mind; but in true inbred vulgarity, there is a deathful callousness, which, in extremity, becomes capable of every sort of bestial habit and crime, without fear, without pleasure, without horror, and without pity. It is in the blunt hand and the dead heart, in the diseased habit, in the hardened conscience, that men become vulgar; they are forever vulgar, precisely in proportion as they are incapable of sympathy,--of quick understanding,--of all that, in deep insistence on the common, but most accurate term, may be called the 'tact' or touch-faculty of body and soul; that tact which the Mimosa has in trees, which the pure woman has above all creatures,--fineness and fulness of sensation, beyond reason,--the guide and sanctifier of reason itself. Reason can but determine what is true: it is the God-given passion of humanity which alone can recognize what God has made good. "We come then to the great concourse of the Dead, not merely to know from them what is True, but chiefly to feel with them, what is Righteous. Now to feel with them we must be like them; and none of us can become that without pains. As the true knowledge is disciplined and tested knowledge,--not the first thought that comes,--so the true passion is disciplined and tested passion,--not the first passion that comes." When we add to this deep feeling and sympathy the versatile poetic imagination which freely constructs all phases of social life and conduct, we have that union of the great powers of the mind and heart which give such concentrated ethical energy to the best literature. Shelley, in his "Defence of Poetry" (pp. 13-14, 20), says:--