the tougher, more iron-textured is your timber,--though, unhappily, also
the smaller. So too with the spirits of men: they become pure from their
errors by suffering for them: he who has battled, were it only with
poverty and hard toil, will be found stronger, more expert, than he who
could stay at home from the battle, concealed among the
provision-wagons, or even not unwatchfully "abiding by the stuff." In
which sense, an observer, not without experience of our time, has
said:--"Had I a man of clearly developed character (clear, sincere
within its limits), of insight, courage, and real applicable force of
head and of heart, to search for; and not a man of luxuriously distorted
character, with haughtiness for courage, and for insight and applicable
force, speculation and plausible show of force,--it were rather among
the lower than among the higher classes that I should look for him."

A hard saying, indeed, seems this same; that he, whose other wants were
all beforehand supplied; to whose capabilities no problem was presented
except even this, How to cultivate them to best advantage, should attain
less real culture than he whose first grand problem and obligation was
nowise spiritual culture, but hard labour for his daily bread! Sad
enough must the perversion be, where preparations of such magnitude
issue in abortion: and a so sumptuous heart with all its appliances can
accomplish nothing, not so much as necessitous nature would of herself
have supplied! Nevertheless, so pregnant is life with evil as with good;
to such height in an age rich, plethorically overgrown with means, can
means be accumulated in the wrong place, and immeasurably aggravate
wrong tendencies, instead of righting them, this sad and strange result
may actually turn out to have been realized.--_Edinburgh Rev. (just
published.)_

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