east wind all the tender buds and blossoms of genius?
Or does the outward chill merely quicken the internal fire to more active life, as the cold blast quickens to intense glow the fiery furnace?
Both views have a certain amount of truth in this.
There is a poverty so squalid that it seems to kill out all the finer elements in an average man or woman.
As a fish assimilates its hue to the sea or river bottom, so a man tends to take on the colour of his environment.
You do not gather grapes from thistles, neither do you look to obtain exalted thoughts or refined instincts from the fetid hovels of the slums.
Besides, the struggle with the grim specter of actual want is too constant and engrossing to leave sufficient leisure for cultivating ideals of beauty or imagination.
The man who lives from hand to mouth, scarcely ever sure in the morning that he will get the wherewithal to purchase a decent dinner, is little likely to contribute in any marked degree to the material or moral amelioration of the race.
And yet there is no getting over the truth of the famous lexicographer's assertion that the greatest
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