hearts of nations stand still
with his shout. What is Beethoven's "Funeral March for the Death of a
Hero" to the symphony of love, pity, and wrathful resolve which the
telegraph of that April morning played on the pulses of a nation?

It has been said that our system of town meetings made our Revolution
possible, by educating the people in self-government. But this was at
most of partial efficacy, while the newspaper and telegraph, gather the
whole nation into a vast town-meeting, where every one hears the
affairs of the country discussed, and where the better judgment is
pretty sure to make itself valid at last. No memorable thing is said or
done, no invention or discovery is made, that some mention of it does
not sooner or later reach the ears of a majority of Americans. It is
this constant mental and moral stimulus which gives them the alertness
and vivacity, the wide-awakeness of temperament, characteristic of
dwellers in great cities, and which has been remarked on by English
tourists as if it were a kind of physiological transformation. They
seem to think we have lost something of that solidity of character
which (with all other good qualities) they consider the peculiar
inheritance of the British race, though inherited in an elder brother's
proportion by the favored dwellers in the British Isles. We doubt if
any substantial excellence is lost by this suppling of the intellectual
faculties, and bringing the nervous system nearer the surface by the
absorption of superfluous fat. What is lost in bulk may be gained in
spring. It is true that the clown, with his parochial horizon, his diet
inconveniently thin, and his head conveniently thick, whose notion of
greatness is a prize pig, and whose patriotism rises or falls with the
strength of his beer, is a creature as little likely to be met with
here as the dodo, his only rival in the qualities that make up a good
citizen; but this is no result of climatic influences. Such creatures
are the contemporaries of an earlier period of civilization than ours.
Nor is it so clear that solidity is always a virtue, and lightness a
vice in character, any more than in bread, or that the leaven of our
institutions works anything else than a wholesome ferment and aeration.
The experience of the last four years is enough to prove that
sensibility may consist with tenacity of purpose, and that enthusiasm
may become a permanent motive where the conviction of the worth of its
object is