Non-Fiction > Books > London, 1881 - Virginibus Puerisque, and other papers

t6 '^Virginib7is PzLcrisqite."
and cannot state openly a distaste for poetry
and painting.
The word " facts " is, in some ways, crucial.
I have spoken with Jesuits and Plymouth
Brethren, mathematicians and poets, dogmatic
republicans and dear old gentlemen in bird's-eye
neckcloths ; and each understood the word
" facts " in an occult sense of his own. Try
as I might, I could get no nearer the principle
of their division. What was essential to them,
seemed to me trivial or untrue. We could come
to no compromise as to what was, or what was
not, important in the life of man. Turn as we
pleased, we all stood back to back in a big
ring, and saw another quarter of the heavens,
with different mountain-tops along the sky-line,
and different constellations overhead. We had
each of us some whimsy in the brain, which we
believed more than anything else, and which
discoloured all experience to its own shade.
How would you have people agree, when one