OCR Text |
Show 316 Early Western Travels [ V6L 26 the pride, and pomp, and circumstance of wealth and equipage, would of necessity be veiled. Under the eye of the solitary [ 63] wanderer, going forth upon a pilgrimage of observation among the ranks of men - who is met but for once, and whose opinion, favourable or otherwise, can be supposed to exert but trifling influence - there is not that necessity for enveloping those petty weaknesses of our nature in the mantle of selfishness which would, under more imposing circumstances, exist. To the mind of delicate sensibility, unschooled in die ways of man, such exhibitions of human heartlessness might, perchance, be anything but interesting; but to one who, elevated by independence of character above the ordinary contingencies of situation and circumstance, can smile at the frailties of his race, even when exhibited at his own expense, they can but afford a fund of interest and instruction. The youthful student, when with fresh, unblunted feeling he for the first time enters the dissecting- room of medical science, turns with sickened, revolting sensibilities from the mutilated form stretched out upon the board before him, while the learned professor, with untrembling nerve, lays bare its secrecies with the crimsoned knife of science. Just so is it with the exhibitions of human nature; yet who will say that dissection of the moral character of man is not as indispensable to an intimate acquaintance with its phenomena, as that of his physical organization for a similar purpose. But, then, there are the brighter features of humanity, which sometimes hang across the wanderer's pathway like the beautiful tints of a summer evening bow; and which, as they are oftenest met reposing beneath the cool, sequestered shades of [ 64] retirement, where the roar and tumult of a busy world are as the heavy swing of the distant wave, so there, oftener than elsewhere, they serve to cheer the \ |