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'Let him consider in how different a degree of detestation, numbers of wicked actions stand there, tho' equally bad and vicious in their own natures; he will soon find, that such of them as strong inclination and custom have prompted him to commit, are generally dressed out and painted with all the false beauties which a soft and a flattering hand can give them; and that the others, to which he feels no propensity, appear, at once, naked and deformed, surrounded with all the true circumstances of folly and dishonour.
But you may go to the churches of almost any of our Protestant denominations, and hear sermons by which you can profit, because the ministers are generally good men, whose moral and spiritual natures are above the average, and who know that the harsh preaching of two or three generations ago would offend and alienate a large part of their audience.
The average Senator was more reserved, but had not much more to say, being always excepting one or two genial natures, handicapped by his own importance. Study it as one might, the hope of education, till the arrival of the President-elect, narrowed itself to the possible influence of only two men Sumner and Seward. Sumner was then fifty years old.
I have seen more drunken people here than during all my residence in England, and, generally, early in the day. Their liquor, so far as I have observed, makes them good-natured and sociable, imparting a perhaps needed geniality to their cold natures. After breakfast we took a drosky, or whatever these fore-and-aft-seated vehicles are called, and set out for three miles distant.
We are willing to allow that many of those who browse in the sleepy meadows of aimless observation, loving to keep their heads down as they gaze at and gather their narcotic herbs, rather than lift them to the horizon beyond or the heaven above, act in obedience to the law of their limited natures.
All natures seem to find themselves more truly in its light; love grows more tender, religion more spiritual, memory sees farther back into the past, grief revisits its mossy marbles, the poet harvests the ripe thoughts which he will tie in sheaves of verses by his winter fireside.
But it is the property of truth and goodness to attract better natures, and to sublimate the weak.
If, at that period of her existence, Cosette had fallen in love with a man in the least unscrupulous or debauched, she would have been lost; for there are generous natures which yield themselves, and Cosette was one of them. One of woman's magnanimities is to yield. Love, at the height where it is absolute, is complicated with some indescribably celestial blindness of modesty.
Both of them thorough gentlemen, very dignified, very nice and precise in all their ways and habits, they were sadly indifferent to the severity of the means by which they compassed their ends; and bloody deeds sat easily, for the most part, upon their well-bred natures.
The philosopher could have no quarrel with him. Between the two extremes are the more thoughtful of the Victorian poets, Browning, Tennyson, Arnold, Clough, whose taste leads them so largely to intellectual pursuits that it is difficult to say whether their principles of moral conduct arise from the poetical or the philosophical part of their natures.
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