In the calm of scholarship men have given up the thought that culture consists of an exquisite refinement in manners and dress, in language and equipage.

The poet laureate makes Maud the type of polished perfection.

She is "icily regular, splendidly null," for culture is more of the heart than of the mind.

But as eloquence means that an orator has so mastered the laws of posture, and gesture and thought and speech that they are utterly forgotten, and have become second nature, so knowledge becomes culture, and physical perfection becomes beauty, only when it is unconscious.
In the moral realm also, the gains for the soul begin with loss.

In the hour of temptation he who sacrifices the higher duty to the lower pleasure will find that ease has shorn away the strength of Samson.
Victor Hugo has pictured a man committing suicide through poverty, and deserting the duty and dwelling where God has placed him.