  Prince Rupert’s drop, paper muslin ghost, white torch—“with pow’r to say unkind things with kindness, and the most irritating things in the midst of love and tears,” you invite destruction. You are like the meditative man with the perfunctory heart; its carved cordiality ran to and fro at first, like an inlaid and roy’l immutable production; then afterward “neglected to be painful” and “deluded him with loitering formality, doing its duty as if it did it not,” presenting an obstruction to the motive that it served. What stood erect in you, has withered. A little “palm-tree of turned wood” informs your once spontaneous core in its immutable reduction. |
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