'Silence! and don't interrupt the court, unless you can say something better than that. Well, let me tell you, I have been in very genteel society, without feeling any thing so human, so catholic, so pantheistical, (in the right sense,) as I did in making one of that queer company. The great lout of a giant, with not soul enough in him to fill out his circumference; the sad little dwarf, with not room enough for hers; the poor, patient, necromanted savage of a bear; the smart, steely, grog-loving, praise-loving keeper; the curious, bookish, indolent traveler. Expressions, all of the grand, never-weary Life-Intention, how widely variant! yet all children, and equally beloved, of the Infinite Father. 'In four of the five cases, it should seem, the creative energy had set about to fashion its supposed ultimate and perfect work, and with what result? At first blush, the failure seemed most conspicuous in my companions, especially the big and the little one; but a small introspection might, perhaps, have disclosed a deeper disappointment in a nobler aim. The bear was the only success among us. He was perfect in his line, though sadly at a disadvantage; ravished from his forest-world, and bedeviled with alien civilization. And note (as that splendid prig, Ruskin, would say) with what mathematical accuracy nature, in her less ambitious essays, goes to the proposed end. The bee's flight--a specimen wonder--is not straighter than her course. In her lower business, she needs no backers. Meddling only monsters her. It is only when she comes to the grand, resulting combination, for which she has so long been fussing and preparing--when she tries her hand ('her 'prentice han', I fear,) on man, that she falters, hesitates, and lastly compromises for something lamentably less than she bargained for. 'Her apparent purpose seems almost inevitably thwarted by some influence--shall we call it malign? or rather shall we consider (as perhaps we should in all short-comings) that 'tis only a matter of time and the comparative degree? a piece of circuition needed for variety of development, and, of necessity, to eventuate in forms fresher, more _prononcés_, nearer perfect than any thing we now wot or conceive of.