The undistinguished old Earth! the dusty clods!

The mere brown handfuls crumbled through the fingers, out of which proceed the trees and the grasses and the animals roaming through them, and man with his vast-aspiring religions and civilisations.

The common and universal;

The servant girl tying up her hair before the broken mirror hung from a nail in the wall; the daisy child-face looking at you from the side of the path as you pass; the slow humor of old gaffers on the village seat in the sun:

These contain you. With all your ambitions you cannot escape and go beyond these. It is impossible.

The bride attiring herself in her white veil, the brilliant and admired wit of the salons, the mathematician in his study, cannot go beyond these,

Any more than the earth can go beyond and fly out of space. It is impossible; it is unthinkable.

* * * * *

Far around and beyond whatever is exceptional and illustrious in human life stretches that which is average and unperceived;

All distinctions, all attainments, all signal beauty, skill, wit, and whatever a man can exhibit in himself, swim and are lost in that great ocean.

The subtle learning of the learned, the beauty of the exceptionally beautiful, the wit of the witty, the fine manners and customs of the courtly—all these things proceed immediately out of the common and undistinguished people and those who stand in direct contact with Nature, and return into them again.

The course of all is the same; they are tossed up thinner and thinner, into mere spray at last—like a wave from the breast of the Ocean—and fall back again.

You try to set yourself apart from the vulgar. It is in vain. In that instant vulgarity attaches itself to you.

If it did not, you would cease to exist.