Page:Ethel Churchill 3.pdf/161

Rh they not revealed! Till now, I never did him justice. I have sometimes thought him, in conversation, too merely amusing; too ready to laugh at enthusiasm,—at what is most true and generous in our nature. How wrong I was! wit, with him, was only the sparkle of the waters which hide precious things in the depths below. I can enter into the sensitiveness which is fain to keep that which it prizes most dearly, hidden from a cold and mocking world. I enter completely into his scorn of our present state of society, so false, so mean; and yet I was scarcely prepared for this dark misanthropy, which dissects so unsparingly, and throws its cold, searching light, into all the miserable retreats of our small vanities and absurd pretensions. How false we are, how unkind! I do not find that I can quite force myself to follow in the track of his glorious aspirations for the future, but how I respect him for the belief! Will the time ever come, when men will feel that the mind and the heart must work in concert, and that we must look around and afar for our