For this the whole education
of Hesper had tended to unfit her. What she had been taught--and
that in a world rendered possible only by the self-denial of a
God--was to drift with the stream, denying herself only that
divine strength of honest love, which would soonest help her to
breast it.
For the earth, it is a blessed thing that those who arrogate to
themselves the holy name of society, and to whom so large a
portion of the foolish world willingly yields it, are in reality
so few and so ephemeral. Mere human froth are they, worked up by
the churning of the world-sea--rainbow-tinted froth, lovely
thinned water, weaker than the unstable itself out of which it is
blown. Great as their ordinance seems, it is evanescent as
arbitrary: the arbitrary is but the slavish puffed up--and is
gone with the hour. The life of the people is below; it ferments,
and the scum is for ever being skimmed off, and cast--God knows
where. All is scum where will is not. They leave behind them
influences indeed, but few that keep their vitality in shapes of
art or literature. There they go--little sparrows of the human
world, chattering eagerly, darting on every crumb and seed of
supposed advantage! while from behind the great dustman's cart,
the huge tiger-cat of an eternal law is creeping upon them. Is it
a spirit of insult that leads me to such a comparison? Where
human beings do not, will not _will_, let them be ladies
gracious as the graces, the comparison is to the disadvantage of
the sparrows.
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