O little fool, that has
published a little book full of little poems or other sputtering tokens
of an uneasy condition, how I love you for the one soft nerve of special
sensibility that runs through your exiguous organism, and the one
phosphorescent particle in your unilluminated intelligence! But if you
don't leave your spun-sugar confectionery business once in a while, and
come out among lusty men,--the bristly, pachydermatous fellows that hew
out the highways for the material progress of society, and the
broad-shouldered, out-of-door men that fight for the great prizes of
life,--you will come to think that the spun-sugar business is the chief
end of man, and begin to feel and look as if you believed yourself as
much above common people as that personage of whom Tourgueneff says that
"he had the air of his own statue erected by national subscription."
--The Master paused and fell into a deep thinking fit, as he does
sometimes. He had had his own say, it is true, but he had established
his character as a listener to my own perfect satisfaction, for I, too,
was conscious of having preached with a certain prolixity.
--I am always troubled when I think of my very limited mathematical
capacities. It seems as if every well-organized mind should be able to
handle numbers and quantities through their symbols to an indefinite
extent; and yet, I am puzzled by what seems to a clever boy with a turn
for calculation as plain as counting his fingers.
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