Few men have so amicably combined the love of a good dinner
and of the higher morality. He seems to have comfortably solved the
problem of having your cake and eating it, at which the ascetic
interpreters of Christianity teach us to despair. He serves us up his
worldly wisdom in a sauce of Plato, and gives a kind of sensuous relish
to the disembodied satisfactions of immortality. He is a better
Christian than many an orthodox divine. If he do not, like Sir Thomas
Browne, love to lose himself in an _O, altitudo!_ yet the sky-piercing
peaks and snowy solitudes of ethical speculation loom always on the
horizon about the sheltered dwelling of his mind, and he continually
gets up from his books to rest and refresh his eyes upon them. He seldom
invites us to alpine-climbing, and when he does, it is to some warm nook
like the Jardin on Mont Blanc, a parenthesis of homely summer nestled
amid the sublime nakedness of snow. If he glance upward at becoming
intervals to the "primal duties," he turns back with a settled
predilection to the "sympathies that are nestled at the feet like
flowers." But it is within his villa that we love to be admitted to him
and to enjoy that garrulity which we forgive more readily in the mother
of the muses than in any of her daughters, unless it be Clio, who is
most like her. If we are in the library, he is reminded of this or that
passage in a favorite author, and, going to the shelves, takes down the
volume to read it aloud with decorous emphasis.
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