[Sidenote: SELF-ADVERTISING PHILANTHROPY]
Try not to become disgusted with active benevolence, or despondent because there is a _philanthropy-trade_. It is a sort of benefit-club of virtue, supported by the contributions of paupers in virtue, founded by genuine enthusiasts who gain a reputation for the thing--then slip in successors who know how to avail themselves of the influence and connections derived thereby--quite gratuitous, however, and bustling-active--but yet _bribe high_ to become the unpaid physicians of the dispensary at St. Luke's Hospital, and bow and scrape and intrigue, Carlyleise and Knappise for it. And such is the [case with regard to] the slave trade. The first abolitionists were the good men who laboured when the thing seemed desperate--it was virtue for its own sake. Then the quakers, Granville Sharp, etc.--then the restless spirits who are under the action of tyrannical oppression from images, and, gradually, mixed vanity and love of power with it--the politicians + saints = Wilberforce. Last come the Scotchmen--and Brougham is now canvassing more successfully for the seat of Wilberforce, who retires with great honour and regret, from infirmities of age and _enoughness_. It is just as with the great original benefactors and founders of useful plans, Raleigh, Sir Hugh Middleton, etc.--men of genius succeeded by sharpers, but who often can better carry on what they never could have first conceived--and this, too, by their very want of those qualities and virtues which were necessary to the discovery.
All mere passions, like spirits and apparitions, have their hour of cock-crow, in which they must vanish. But pure love is, therefore, no _mere_ passion; and it is a test of its being love, that no reason can be assigned _why_ it should disappear. Shall we not always, in this life at least, remain _animæ dimidiatæ_?--must not the moral reason always hold out the perfecting of each by union of both as good and lovely? With reason, therefore, and conscience let love vanish, but let these vanish only with our being.
The sick and sleepless man, after the dawn of the fresh day, is fain to watch the smoke now from this and then from the other chimney of the town from his bed-chamber, as if willing to borrow from others that sense of a new day, of a discontinuity between the yesterday and the to-day which his own sensations had not afforded. [Compare Wordsworth's "Blessed Barrier Between Day and Day," Wordsworth's Third Sonnet to Sleep, _Poetical Works_, 1889, 354.]