We hate and despise in our ignorance, and grow weak; but love and pity
thrive on knowledge, and to love and pity we owe all the beauty of
life, and all our highest power.
_"It is that life of custom and accident in which many of us pass
much of our time in this world; that life in which we do what we have
not purposed, and speak what we do not mean, and assent to what we do
not understand; that life which is overlaid by the weight of things
external to it, and is moulded by them, instead of assimilating them;
that which, instead of growing and blossoming under any wholesome dew,
is crystallised over with it, as with hoar frost, and becomes to the
true life what an arborescence is to a tree, a candied agglomeration of
thoughts and habits foreign to it, brittle, obstinate, and icy, which
can neither bend nor grow, but must be crushed and broken to bits if it
stands in our way. All men are liable to be in some degree frost-bitten
in this sort; all are partly encumbered and crusted over with idle
matter; only, if they have real life in them, they are always breaking
this bark away in noble rents, until it becomes, like the black strips
upon the birch tree, only a witness of their own inward strength.
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