-fly of Astaboras to the Anglo and Italo-mania of Boston Bay. Sacred
cities, to which a periodical religious pilgrimage was enjoined, or
stringent laws and customs, tending to invigorate the national bond,
were the check on the old rovers; and the cumulative values of long
residence are the restraints on the itineracy of the present day. The
antagonism of the two tendencies is not less active in individuals, as
the love of adventure or the love of repose happens to predominate.
A man of rude health and flowing spirits has the faculty of rapid
domestication, lives in his wagon and roams through all latitudes as
easily as a Calmuc. At sea, or in the forest, or in the snow, he sleeps
as warm, dines with as good appetite, and associates as happily as
beside his own chimneys. Or perhaps his facility is deeper seated, in
the increased range of his faculties of observation, which yield him
points of interest wherever fresh objects meet his eyes. The pastoral
nations were needy and hungry to desperation; and this intellectual
nomadism, in its excess, bankrupts the mind through the dissipation of
power on a miscellany of objects. The home-keeping wit, on the other
hand, is that continence or content which finds all the elements of
life in its own soil; and which has its own perils of monotony and
deterioration, if not stimulated by foreign infusions.

Every thing the individual sees without him corresponds to his states
of mind, and every thing is in turn intelligible to him, as his onward
thinking leads him into the truth to which that fact or series belongs.

The primeval world,--the Fore-World, as the Germans say,--I can dive
to it in myself as well as grope for it with researching fingers in
catacombs, libraries, and the broken reliefs and torsos of ruined
villas.

What is the foundation of that interest all men feel in Greek history,
letters, art, and poetry, in all its periods from the Heroic or Homeric
age down to the domestic life of the Athenians and Spartans, four or
five centuries later? What but this, that every man passes personally
through a Grecian period. The Grecian state is the era of the bodily
nature, the perfection of the senses,--of the spiritual nature unfolded
in strict unity with the body. In it existed those human forms which
supplied the sculptor with his models of Hercules, Phoebus, and Jove;
not like the forms abounding in the streets of modern cities, wherein
the face is a confused blur of feature