t thou, my little Brotherkin, suddenly covered-up within
the largest imaginable Glass-bell,--what a thing it were, not for
thyself only, but for the world! Post Letters, more or fewer, from all
the four winds, impinge against thy Glass walls, but have to drop
unread: neither from within comes there question or response into any
Postbag; thy Thoughts fall into no friendly ear or heart, thy
Manufacture into no purchasing hand: thou art no longer a circulating
venous-arterial Heart, that, taking and giving, circulatest through
all Space and all Time: there has a Hole fallen-out in the
immeasurable, universal World-tissue, which must be darned-up again!"

'Such venous-arterial circulation, of Letters, verbal Messages, paper
and other Packages, going out from him and coming in, are a
blood-circulation, visible to the eye: but the finer nervous
circulation, by which all things, the minutest that he does, minutely
influence all men, and the very look of his face blesses or curses
whomso it lights on, and so generates ever new blessing or new
cursing: all this you cannot see, but only imagine. I say, there is
not a red Indian, hunting by Lake Winnipic, can quarrel with his
squaw, but the whole world must smart for it: will not the price of
beaver rise? It is a mathematical fact that the casting of this pebble
from my hand alters the centre of gravity of the Universe.

'If now an existing generation of men stand so woven together, not
less indissolubly does generation with generation. Hast thou ever
meditated on that word, Tradition: how we inherit not Life only, but
all the garniture and form of Life; and work, and speak, and even
think and feel, as our Fathers, and primeval grandfathers, from the
beginning, have given it us?--Who printed thee, for example, this
unpretending Volume on the Philosophy of Clothes? Not the Herren
Stillschweigen and Company; but Cadmus of Thebes, Faust of Mentz, and
innumerable others whom thou knowest not. Had there been no
Moesogothic Ulfila, there had been no English Shakspeare, or a
different one. Simpleton! it was Tubalcain that made thy very Tailor's
needle, and sewed that court-suit of thine.

'Yes, truly; if Nature is one, and a living indivisible whole, much
more is Mankind, the Image that reflects and creates Nature, without
which Nature were not. As palpable life-streams in that wondrous
Individual Mankind, among so many life-streams that are not palpable,
flow on those main-currents o