d him. He must have a catholicity, a power to see
with a free and disengaged look every object. Yet is this private
interest and self so overcharged, that, if a man seeks a companion
who can look at objects for their own sake, and without affection
or self-reference, he will find the fewest who will give him that
satisfaction; whilst most men are afflicted with a coldness, an
incuriosity, as soon as any object does not connect with their
self-love. Though they talk of the object before them, they are thinking
of themselves, and their vanity is laying little traps for your
admiration.

But after a man has discovered that there are limits to the interest
which his private history has for mankind, he still converses with his
family, or a few companions,--perhaps with half a dozen personalities
that are famous in his neighborhood. In Boston, the question of life is
the names of some eight or ten men. Have you seen Mr. Allston, Doctor
Channing, Mr. Adams, Mr. Webster, Mr. Greenough? Have you heard Everett,
Garrison, Father Taylor, Theodore Parker? Have you talked with Messieurs
Turbinewheel, Summitlevel, and Lacofrupees? Then you may as well die. In
New York, the question is of some other eight, or ten, or twenty. Have
you seen a few lawyers, merchants, and brokers,--two or three scholars,
two or three capitalists, two or three editors of newspapers? New
York is a sucked orange. All conversation is at an end, when we have
discharged ourselves of a dozen personalities, domestic or imported,
which make up our American existence. Nor do we expect anybody to be
other than a faint copy of these heroes.

Life is very narrow. Bring any club or company of intelligent men
together again after ten years, and if the presence of some penetrating
and calming genius could dispose them to frankness, what a confusion
of insanities would come up! The "causes" to which we have sacrificed,
Tariff or Democracy, Whiggism or Abolition, Temperance or Socialism,
would show like roots of bitterness and dragons of wrath: and our
talents are as mischievous as if each had been seized upon by some bird
of prey, which had whisked him away from fortune, from truth, from the
dear society of the poets, some zeal, some bias, and only when he was
now gray and nerveless was it relaxing its claws, and he awaking to
sober perceptions.

Culture is the suggestion from certain best thoughts, that a man has a
range of affinities, through which he can modulate the