55 



THE INNER LIFE. 



Emersox remarks in his beautiful essay on " Gifts," that "Flowers 

 and fruits are always fit presents, — flowers, because they are a proud 

 assertion that a ray of beauty outvalues all the utilities of the world. 

 These gay natures contrast with the somewhat stern countenance of 

 ordinary nature ; they are like music heard out of a workhouse ;' ' 

 and it is in the sympathy which all natural objects have for the best 

 sentiments of our nature which makes them always acceptable. Man 

 is something more than a bundle of petty cares and jealousies : he has 

 within him a world of living beauty, and an existence ever seeking 

 for closer sympathy with moral worth, and anxiously striving after 

 higher states of perfection. But in the intercourse of men with each 

 other the tendencies and desires and passions, which have been im- 

 planted within them for purposes of beauty — and beauty is the highest 

 form of utility — get pushed beyond the legitimate sphere of their 

 action, and become characterized in their development as vices. 

 Hence, in all cities and large aggregations of men, the true nobility 

 and intrinsic stamp of human character is sunk below the duplicities 

 which float upon the surface of customs and usages. Thus civiliza- 

 tion, viewed in a narrow and partial light, has all the appearance of 

 soul-murder ; but, seen through the " optic glass " of a transcendental 

 philosophy, simply indicates a necessary phase of the human mind in 

 its progress upward ; and is a manifestation, not of the destruction 

 and annihilation of virtue, but of the perversion and distortion of our 

 legitimate aims and actions. To look at modem society in its existing 

 state of complexity and petty warfare, it has all the semblance of a 

 huge mad-house, but seen as a necessary condition of the human mind 

 in its transition from a rugged barbarity to a high and exalted morality 

 and beauty, it appears as a plain fact, but significant of the multiform 

 changes and modifications of the same identical purpose, still striving 

 to evolve itself through all the ages of the world. 



But when we leave this enclosed world of antipodean and twisted 

 interests, where we are eternally compelled to hedge and dodge, and 



