There is a little Grecian temple yonder, back of the evergreens, with a triangular stove-funnel revolving at its top; and next door a Dutch-built stable, with a Turk's turban for a cupola; and just beyond that, a _chalet_-roof, sprouting without any provocation whatever out of an engine-house. I do not think they are caricatures of some characters. I knew a politician once, very low down in even that scale; Quilp they nicknamed him; the cruelest husband; quarter-dollarish in his views and principles, and greedy for bribes even as low as that: yet I have seen that man work with a rose-bush as long and tenderly as a mother with her baby, and his eyes glow and grow wet at the sight of a new and delicate plant. Near him lived a woman,--a relative of his, I believe: one of those women who absorb so much of the world's room and air, and have a right to do it: a nature made up of grand, good pieces, with no mean bits mortared in: fresh and child-like, too, with heat or tears ready for any tale of wrong, or strongly spoken, true word. But strike against one prejudice that woman had, her religious sect-feeling, and she was hard and cruel as Nero. It was the stove-funnel in that temple. Human nature is full of such unaccountable warts and birth-marks and sixth fingers; and the best reason that I know of why all practical schemes for a perfect social system have failed is, that they are so perfect, so compact, that they ignore all these excrescences, these untied ends, in making up their whole. Yet it is a wonderful bit of mosaic, this Communist system: a place for every man, and every man in his place; "to insure to each human being the freest development of his faculties": there is a grand fragment of absolute truth in that, a going back to primal Nature, to a like life with that of sunshine and pines, a Utopia more Christ-like than the heaven (which Christ never taught) of eternal harp-playing and golden streets. But as for making it real, every man's life should have the integrity of meaning of that of a tree. A. statesman, B. seer, C. scavenger: pines, raspberries, oaks. Impossible, as we know. And then, a thistle at the beginning knows it is a thistle, and cannot be anything else, so there is the end of it; but when Pratt, by nature _ne_ knife-grinder, asserts himself poet, what then? How many men know their vocation? Who is going about to tie on the labels? Who would you be willing should tie on yours? Then, again, there is your neighbor Brownson, with a yeasty brain, fermenting too fast through every phase of creed or party to accept a healthful "settling"; so it is left to work itself out, and it will settle itself by-and-by, in a life or two it may be. You know other brains which, if you will but consider, prove this life to be only one stage of a many-yeared era: they are lying fallow from birth until death; they have powers latent in them, that next time, perhaps, will bear golden grain or fruit. Now they are resting, they lie fallow.