faculty, and one feels sad and knows not well what to
make of it. He almost shuns their eye; he fears they will
upbraid God. What should they do? It seems a great injustice.
But see the facts nearly and these mountainous inequalities
vanish. Love reduces them as the sun melts the iceberg in
the sea. The heart and soul of all men being one, this
bitterness of His and Mine ceases. His is mine. I am my
brother and my brother is me. If I feel overshadowed and
outdone by great neighbors, I can yet love; I can still
receive; and he that loveth maketh his own the grandeur
he loves. Thereby I make the discovery that my brother is
my guardian, acting for me with the friendliest designs,
and the estate I so admired and envied is my own. It is
the nature of the soul to appropriate all things. Jesus
and Shakspeare are fragments of the soul, and by love I
conquer and incorporate them in my own conscious domain.
His virtue,--is not that mine? His wit,--if it cannot be
made mine, it is not wit.

Such also is the natural history of calamity. The changes
which break up at short intervals the prosperity of men
are advertisements of a nature whose law is growth. Every
soul is by this intrinsic necessity quitting its whole
system of things, its friends and home and laws and faith,
as the shell-fish crawls out of its beautiful but stony
case, because it no longer admits of its growth, and slowly
forms a new house. In proportion to the vigor of the
individual these revolutions are frequent, until in some
happier mind they are incessant and all worldly relations
hang very loosely about him, becoming as it were a