er's in Cambridge to the Exchange Coffeehouse in Boston
did in after years. It takes a good while to measure the radius of the
circle that is about us, for the moon seems at first as near as the
watchface. Who knows but that, after a certain number of ages, the
planet we live on may seem to us no bigger than our neighbor Venus
appeared when she passed before the sun a few months ago, looking as
if we could take her between our thumb and finger, like a bullet or a
marble? And time, too; how long was it from the serious sunrise to the
joyous "sun-down" of an old-fashioned, puritanical, judaical first day
of the week, which a pious fraud christened "the Sabbath"? Was it a
fortnight, as we now reckon duration, or only a week? Curious entities,
or non-entities, space and tithe? When you see a metaphysician trying to
wash his hands of them and get rid of these accidents, so as to lay his
dry, clean palm on the absolute, does it not remind you of the hopeless
task of changing the color of the blackamoor by a similar proceeding?
For space is the fluid in which he is washing, and time is the soap
which he is using up in the process, and he cannot get free from them
until he can wash himself in a mental vacuum.

In my reference to the old house in a former paper, published years ago,
I said,

"By and by the stony foot of the great University will plant itself
on this whole territory, and the private recollections which clung so
tenaciously to the place and its habitations will have died with those
who cherished them."

What strides the great University has taken since those words were
written! During all my early years our old Harvard Alma Mater sat still
and lifeless as the colossi in the Egyptian desert. Then all at once,
like the statue in Don Giovanni, she moved from her pedestal. The fall
of that "stony foot" has effected a miracle like the harp that Orpheus
played, like the teeth which Cadmus sowed. The plain where the moose and
the bear were wandering while Shakespeare was writing Hamlet, where a
few plain dormitories and other needed buildings were scattered about
in my school-boy days, groans under the weight of the massive edifices
which have sprung up all around them, crowned by the tower of that noble
structure which stands in full view before me as I lift my eyes from the
portfolio on the back of which I am now writing.

For I must be permitted to remind you that I have not yet opened it. I
have told you that I h