“These things were matters of long, long ago, and I came to this country soon after.  I brought with me, premature age, a past of melancholy memories, and the magic spectacles.  I had become their slave.  I had nothing more to fear.  Having seen myself, I was compelled to see others, properly to understand my relations to them.  The lights that cheer the future of other men had gone out for me.  My eyes were those of an exile turned backwards upon the receding shore, and not forwards with hope upon the ocean.  I mingled with men, but with little pleasure.  There are but many varieties of a few types.  I did not find those I came to clearer sighted than those I had left behind.  I heard men called shrewd and wise, and report said they were highly intelligent and successful.  But when I looked at them through my glasses, I found no halo of real manliness.  My finest sense detected no aroma of purity and principle; but I saw only a fungus that had fattened and spread in a night.  They all went to the theater to see actors upon the stage.  I went to see actors in the boxes, so consummately cunning, that the others did not know they were acting, and they did not suspect it themselves.

“Perhaps you wonder it did not make me misanthropical.  My dear friends, do not forget that I had seen myself.  It made me compassionate, not cynical.  Of course I could not value highly the ordinary standards of success and excellence.  When I went to church and saw a thin, blue, artificial flower, or a great sleepy cushion expounding the beauty of holiness to pews full of eagles, half-eagles, and threepences, however adroitly concealed in broadcloth and boots:  or saw an onion in an Easter bonnet weeping over the sins of Magdalen, I did not feel as they felt who saw in all this, not only propriety, but piety.  Or when at public meetings an eel stood up on end, and wriggled and squirmed lithely in every direction, and declared that, for his part, he went in for rainbows and hot water—­how could I help seeing that he was still black and loved a slimy pool?

“I could not grow misanthropical when I saw in the eyes of so many who were called old, the gushing fountains of eternal youth, and the light of an immortal dawn, or when I saw those who were esteemed unsuccessful and aimless, ruling a fair realm of peace and plenty, either in themselves, or more perfectly in another—­a realm and princely possession for which they had well renounced a hopeless search and a belated triumph.  I knew one man who had been for years a by-word for having sought the philosopher’s stone.  But I looked at him through the spectacles and saw a satisfaction in concentrated energies, and a tenacity arising from devotion to a noble dream, which was not apparent in the youths who pitied him in the aimless effeminacy of clubs, nor in the clever gentlemen who cracked their thin jokes upon him over a gossiping dinner.