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The dimmest back-scene at the opera, when the tenor is singing his sweetest, seems hardly to belong to a world more detached from responsibility. What it is that infuses so rich an interest into the general charm is difficult to say in a few words; yet as we wander hither and thither in quest of sacred canvas and immortal bronze and stone we still feel the genius of the place hang about.
But the spirit of nature, shifting and sporting with a lovely grace, infuses itself here and there into the vine, and amidst wondrous struggles lets itself be strained and refined, in order to descend along the magic channel of the palate into our inmost recesses, and there to rouse all our noblest energies out of the torpor and lethargy of their primitive chaos.
It is the love of the people; it is their attachment to their government, from the sense of the deep stake they have in such a glorious institution, which gives you your army and your navy, and infuses into both that liberal obedience without which your army would be a base rabble, and your navy nothing but rotten timber.
And into all she infuses a spirit that is all her own a spirit of delicate grace and beauty of which she alone has the secret. It is her Divinity, then, that he sees, and rightly. But, wrongly, he draws certain one-sided conclusions. Her pontiffs must all be saints, her priests shining lights, her people stars in her firmament.
The veriest coward would become an inspired hero, equal to the bravest, at such a time; Love would inspire him. That courage which, as Homer says, the god breathes into the souls of some heroes, Love of his own nature infuses into the lover. Love will make men dare to die for their beloved love alone; and women as well as men.
There is more of turn than of truth in a saying of Seneca, that drunkenness does not produce, but discover faults. Common experience teaches the contrary. Wine throws a man out of himself, and infuses qualities into the mind, which she is a stranger to in her sober moments. The person you converse with, after the third bottle, is not the same man who at first sat down at the table with you.
Sometimes a strange incongruous romance, like moonlight on a puddle, lights up these mongrel liaisons, and infuses into them a burlesque of sentiment. We found one old hunter whose squaw ran away from him into the mountains at regular six-months' intervals, and who invariably spent hundreds of dollars and no end to hardships in hunting her up and restoring her to his wigwam.
Too great a multitude of elements, elements that are not assorted into groups and tied by relations or principles, cannot be grasped. Hence the artist infuses into the world which he creates a new and wholly subjective simplicity and unity, to which there is no parallel in nature.
Strong men, young men, aged men, men of leisure, Christian men all ready to march under the stars and stripes, or to pour out their treasure for others. Mothers and wives and sisters, with breaking hearts and tremulous benedictions, bidding the heroes go offering them on their country's altar. Oh, it would not be thus but for the true manhood which our government infuses into loyal citizens.
So slow and patient is the process by which Christianity infuses itself into the social life of a converted people!
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