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is for beauty and for love of beauty; there is little of man's hope in the world but to see and to create beauty. A conception of the brevity of life is made to frustrate the utility of the beautiful; yet who believes in the brevity of life? Men think they cannot live now; they are to live hereafter; "they never are, but always to be blest:" but what is a coward but a coward, even in heaven? If any life is noble, this life is noble. We may observe all laws, yet court all that is lovely in the universe. This is religion: to resist temptation, and not to avoid it; it is not to hate life's poetry and hug the prose,—to take by choice the crust of the "bread of life,"—to close our eyes against a thousand charms, to stop our ears against a thousand harmonies, to bury ourselves in brown homilies and black bombazine, and forever to ruminate in silence and solemnity, while the blue steel of heaven bends over us in vain; this may be to hate the devil, but it is not to love the Lord.

Especially do the true proportions of the carnal and the spiritual find an expression in that aggregate wisdom of the middle classes, known as common sense: a wisdom which takes calm and healthy views of things,—which respects well worn opinions, believes in proverbs, brings its precedents, and has faith in past experience and success; a conservative wisdom, sceptical of untried and brilliant isms, less from contempt for what is new than from content with what is approved,—less from dislike of change than from dislike of that lean and hungry vanity which is the motor of most innovation. It has the merit of steadiness and consistency, and is, more than

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