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Many parts of your book have interested me much: I always wished to hear an independent judgment about the Rajah Brooke, and now I have been delighted with your splendid eulogium on him. With respect to the fewness and inconspicuousness of the flowers in the tropics, may it not be accounted for by the hosts of insects, so that there is no need for the flowers to be conspicuous?
Nature, in her most dazzling aspects or stupendous parts, is but the background and theatre of the tragedy of man. We may find a secondary proof of this in the fewness of those fine descriptive strokes and subtle indirect touches of colour or sound which arise with incessant spontaneity, where a mastering passion for nature steeps the mind in vigilant, accurate, yet half-unconscious, observation.
Bunyan was preaching in a barn, and showing the fewness of those that should be saved, there stood one of the learned to take advantage of his words; and having done preaching, the schoolman said to him, You are a deceiver, a person of no charity, and therefore not fit to preach; for he that in effect condemneth the greatest part of his hearers hath no charity, and therefore not fit to preach.
Which Explication I propose, not that I think the Blackness of the Velvet proceeds from the Cause assign'd, since each Single Pile of Silk is Black by reason of its Texture, in what Position soever you Look upon it; But that the Greater Blackness of one of these Tuffts seems to proceed from the Greater Paucity of Beams Reflected from it, and that from the Fewness of those Parts of a Surface that Reflect Beams, and the Multitude of those Shaded Parts that Reflect none.
Stevenson has given an interesting description of his cabin in the beacon, where he had passed many weeks ‘in a kind of active retirement, making practical experiment of the fewness of the positive wants of man.’ This cabin measured not more than four feet three inches in breadth on the floor; and though, from the oblique direction of the beams of the structure, it widened towards the top, yet it did not admit of the full expansion of his arms when he stood on the floor, while its length was little more than sufficient for suspending a cot-bed during the night.
He was so framed by nature as to be able to keep his inconveniences separate from his resentments; though indeed if the sum of these latter had at the most always been small, that was doubtless in some degree a consequence of the fewness of the former. His greatest inconvenience, he would have admitted, had he analyzed, was in finding it so taken for granted that, as he had money, he had force.
'My riches consist not in the abundance of my possessions, but in the fewness of my wants. 'The less a man needs, the nearer is he to the gods. So, what a lesson for us all in this age, where everyone of us is tempted to adopt a scale of what is necessary very far beyond the truth. Young and old dare, if need be, to be poor. 'Having food and raiment, let us therewith be content.
There are certain great living religions which make this claim of universality. Judaism and Parseeism have both entertained this expectation, but the fewness of their adherents at the present time indicates that the expectation is but feebly held. The three living faiths which aspire to universal dominion are Buddhism, Mohammedanism, and Christianity. Each of these hopes to possess the earth.
Perhaps there was compensation for the fewness of the cases you had to observe in the keenness with which you were able to observe them. Perhaps the Great Disposer saw that in your case the pebble got nearly all the polishing it would stand, the man nearly all the chances he could improve.
He was so framed by nature as to be able to keep his inconveniences separate from his resentments; though indeed if the sum of these latter had at the most always been small, that was doubtless in some degree a consequence of the fewness of the former. His greatest inconvenience, he would have admitted, had he analyzed, was in finding it so taken for granted that, as he had money, he had force.
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