any lot—however hard, bitter, and to healthy beings, unbearable. But the number of persons who hold such views must be growing smaller every day. For to most people it is getting clearer that the measure of responsiveness in any being is the measure of his power. "He that hath ears, let him hear." To those who can hear it is a friend who calls—to those who can receive, it is a friend who enters. "The whole universe," said Thoreau, "is on the side of the sensitive."
And we are all born sensitive—peasant's child as well as princeling, beggar and king, and out of this sensitiveness, which appears at first as mere weakness, all the higher kinds of energy are evolved. Sympathy, intellect, self-control, intuition, genius—all take their rise in it, draw their underground supplies from it. Thus it would seem that Carlyle is literally right when he says that the materials for human virtue, far from being rare, are "everywhere abundant as the light of the sun," since everywhere, in the rudest places, children are born, not hidebound, but with a delicate, receptive organ for covering. For a little while they can lose and yet recover their sensitiveness. Nature seems loath to let them finally be hardened—despoiled of their humanity. They gather, they even re-gather,
