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Modest yet proud, wise as well as witty, cynical but above all things sincere, he combined the characters of a charming companion and a good comrade. His conversation and his private letters sparkled like his books and articles. Original expressions, just similitudes, striking phrases, quaint or droll ideas welled in his mind without the slightest effort. He was always at his best.
It is said, as by chance, by instinct, and by dictate; and the meaning is, by divine providence; since, while the divine providence is unknown, it has such an appearance; for the Lord opens internal similitudes, so that they may see themselves.
And when he had heard them he began to make similitudes, and offer reasons which were not like those which he had spoken the first day; for he said to them, "I ask of ye, whether it is well that I should be left without men? or if I were without them, I should be like unto one who hath lost his right arm, or to a bird that hath no wings, or to one who should do battle and hath neither spear nor sword.
The same Chrysippus observes also, by the use of similitudes, that everything in its kind, when arrived at maturity and perfection, is superior to that which is not as, a horse to a colt, a dog to a puppy, and a man to a boy so whatever is best in the whole universe must exist in some complete and perfect being. But nothing is more perfect than the world, and nothing better than virtue.
He that has got a set of similitudes calculated according to the old philosophy, and PTOLEMY's system of the world, must burn his commonplace book, and go a-gleaning for new ones; it being, nowadays, much more gentle and warrantable to take a similitude from the Man in the Moon than from solid orbs: for though few people do absolutely believe that there is any such Eminent Person there; yet the thing is possible, whereas the other is not.
"And winter, slumbering in the open air, Wears on his smiling face a dream of spring." Here again the intellect is urged to its highest action, the abstract or imaginative action, to do the hests of a sensibility so finely wrought by the inward impulsion to seek for the most exquisite that nature can furnish, that it yields similitudes most delicate, most apt, most expressive.
That animal type has hitherto been studied with reference only to its differences, not to its similitudes; in its organic manifestations, not in its faculties. Animal faculties are perfected in direct transmission, in obedience to laws which remain to be discovered. These faculties correspond to the forces which express them, and those forces are essentially material and divisible.
This is the place to record a new effect of that great law of contraries, which produces so many crises in the human heart and accounts for such varied eccentricities that we are forced to remember it sometimes as well as its counterpart, the law of similitudes.
“Oh, voyons,” she protested. “I am aware that you are very much younger, but the similitudes of opinions, origins and perhaps at bottom, faintly, of character, of chivalrous devotion—no, you must be able to understand him in a measure. He is infinitely scrupulous and recklessly brave.”
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