Perhaps no
considerable minority, perhaps no one man leads a quite clean and
lofty life. What then? We concede in sadness the fact. But we say
that these low customary ways are not all that survives in human
beings. There is that in us which mutters, and that which groans,
and that which triumphs, and that which aspires. There are facts on
which men of the world superciliously smile, which are worth all
their trade and politics, the impulses, namely, which drive young men
into gardens and solitary places, and cause extravagant gestures,
starts, distortions of the countenance, and passionate exclamations;
sentiments, which find no aliment or language for themselves on the
wharves, in court, or market, but which are soothed by silence, by
darkness, by the pale stars, and the presence of nature. All over
the modern world the educated and susceptible have betrayed their
discontent with the limits of our municipal life, and with the
poverty of our dogmas of religion and philosophy. They betray this
impatience by fleeing for resource to a conversation with nature --
which is courted in a certain moody and exploring spirit, as if they
anticipated a more intimate union of man with the world than has been
known in recent ages.
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