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    Who has not sometimes derived an inexpressible satisfaction from his food in which appetite had no share?  I have been thrilled to think that I owed a mental perception to the commonly gross sense of taste, that I have been inspired through the palate, that some berries which I had eaten on a hillside had fed my genius.  "The soul not being mistress of herself," says Thseng-tseu, "one looks, and one does not see; one listens, and one does not hear; one eats, and one does not know the savor of food."  He who distinguishes the true savor of his food can never be a glutton; he who does not cannot be otherwise.  A puritan may go to his brown-bread crust with as gross an appetite as ever an alderman to his turtle.  Not that food which entereth into the mouth defileth a man, but the appetite with which it is eaten.  It is neither the quality nor the quantity, but the devotion to sensual savors; when that which is eaten is not a viand to sustain our animal, or inspire our spiritual life, but food for the worms that possess us.  If the hunter has a taste for mud-turtles, muskrats, and other such savage tidbits, the fine lady indulges a taste for jelly made of a calf's foot, or for sardines from over the sea, and they are even.  He goes to the mill-pond, she to her preserve-pot.  The wonder is how they, how you and I, can live this slimy, beastly life, eating and drinking.
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