ORDINARY people regard a man of a certain force and inflexibility of character as they do a lion. They look at him with a sort of wonder-perhaps they admire him—but they will on no account house with him. The lap-dog, who wags his tail, and licks the hand, and cringes at the nod of every stranger, is a much more acceptable companion to them.

Merkel.

THE heart of man is older than his head. The first-born is sensitive, but blind-his younger brother has a cold, but all-comprehensive glance. The blind must consent to be led by the clear-sighted if he would avoid falling.

Fred. Will. Ziegler.

THE most reckless sinner against his own conscience has always in the background the consolation, that he will go on in this course only this time, or only so long, but that at such a time he will amend. We may be assured that we do not stand clear with our own consciences so long as we determine, or project, or even hold it possible, at some future time to alter our course of action. He who is certain of his own conduct, feels perfectly confident

that he cannot change it, nor the principles upon which it is founded;—that, on this point, his freedom is gone, that he is fixed for ever in these resolves.

Fichte.

ONE solitary philosopher may be great, virtuous and happy in the depth of poverty, but not a whole people.

Isaak Iselin.

......Is it then the involuntary sense of something untrue which makes the world distrustful and incredulous of the genuineness of tender emotions and deep feelings? Or is it from a general incapacity to understand what love is, that it is generally ridiculed, and never mentioned but with a sort of trivial irony, the vulgarity of which is almost greater than its offensiveness? The answer I leave. At all events, there is nothing which so cramps every flight of the soul, as the mocking doubt of all that is unusual and elevated. This necessarily begets falsehood, or (what is as bad) that hard pride which contemns public opinion. Offended earnestness, which can never tolerate or forgive frivolous and empty jests, avenges itself on folly and inanity by assuming an attitude of haughty defiance.

The great world, or, as it is called, polite society,

has put on a countenance of such youthful gaiety, that the smallest cloud of deeper emotion necessarily disturbs it. There is nothing by which a man makes himself more tiresome or more ridiculous than by allowing what passes within him to appear on the surface; by suffering his real nature to gleam through the forms of society. Now any interference, whether kindly or offensively intended, with a man's personal relations, causes a sudden agitation which makes too forcible an appeal to truth; it cannot remain mute, it betrays itself. In order to avoid the ridicule consequent upon this, he must laugh at his own want of self-command. According as that is done with good sense or with grace, social hypocrisy acquires a tinge either of the humorous or the attractive. But if timidity and awkwardness are mingled with false shame, and he endeavours to explain away and to apologize for what was perhaps a solitary indication of something really good, nothing remains but the flattest common-places of the flattest persiflage.

Is it to be wondered that men of profound minds withdraw with a contemptuous smile from fashionable society?

Must this be so? Must the higher classes thus detach themselves from all others, like an isolated piece of merely external life, which knows nothing, and must know nothing, of the internal? To wrest

things out of their connexion and series, is to destroy them. When the fibres which unite a being are broken, it breathes no living breath,-it becomes a caricature or a lie.

This state of things everybody has an interest in preventing; but especially women, whose vocation it is to breathe over society a warm and vivifying breath, and to render all isolation in it impossible. This breath of apprehensiveness and enthusiasm, which discovers and fans every congenial spirit even before it is conscious of its own existence, ought to pervade society, and to form a more genial atmosphere, in which every bud and flower of feeling is not doomed to instant death. If the influence of the female sex is negative, it is yet of immense reality and strength, from the mere fact that it acts by removing the barriers opposed to the positive display of the intellectual nature of man.

Women might at least tolerate the aspirations of a lofty spirit, the development of enlarged and generous opinions, the kindlings of a living vigorous will At least they might abstain from throwing ridicule on the enthusiasm which is possible: at least they might forgive youth if its quick fire flames up above the low enclosures of the conventional. They know not their own power; they know not how and whence they can elevate existence: they commonly know it. not even in detail, though they might, it should seem,

observe how powerfully one single intelligent glance of sympathy-the silent accompaniment and completion of half-formed thoughts,-may act on the general direction of the mind and character; how the conviction of being understood and appreciated gives wings to thoughts, and eagle pinions to exertions: what it is to be able to look forward to praise and honour, as a reward for every victory over low desires.

There are eyes which need only to look up, to touch every chord of a breast choked by the stifling atmosphere of stiff and stagnant society, and to call forth tones which might become the accompanying music of a life.

This gentle transfusion of mind into mind is the secret of sympathy. It is never understood, but ever felt; and where it is allowed to exert its power, it fills and extends intellectual life far beyond the measure of ordinary conception.

How many have known and forgotten instances of such awakening! Why do women present an attitude of cold fashionableness to a world which they might win by their sweetness, and inspire by their virtue? Their light footsteps ought to touch the earth, only to mark the track which leads to heaven.

Madame de la Motte Fouqué. (Die Frau der vornehmen Welt.)