re as far off as ever from an
intellectual union, and the moral union is for comparatively low and
external purposes, like the cooeperation of a ship's company, or of a
fire-club. But how insular and pathetically solitary are all the
people we know! Nor dare they tell what they think of each other, when
they meet in the street. We have a fine right, to be sure, to taunt
men of the world with superficial and treacherous courtesies!

Such is the tragic necessity which strict science finds underneath our
domestic and neighborly life, irresistibly driving each adult soul as
with whips into the desert, and making our warm covenants sentimental
and momentary. We must infer that the ends of thought were
peremptory, if they were to be secured at such ruinous cost. They are
deeper than can be told, and belong to the immensities and
eternities. They reach down to that depth where society itself
originates and disappears,--where the question is, Which is first, man
or men?--where the individual is lost in his source.

But this banishment to the rocks and echoes no metaphysics can make
right or tolerable. This result is so against nature, such a
half-view, that it must be corrected by a common sense and
experience. "A man is born by the side of his father, and there he
remains." A man must be clothed with society, or we shall feel a
certain bareness and poverty, as of a displaced and unfurnished
member. He is to be dressed in arts and institutions, as well as
body-garments. Now and then a man exquisitely made can live alone,
and must but coop up most men, and you undo them. "The king lived and
ate in his hall with men, and understood men," said Selden. When a
young barrister said to the late Mr. Mason, "I keep my chamber to read
law." "Read law!" replied the veteran, "'tis in the courtroom you
must read law." Nor is the rule otherwise for literature. If you would
learn to write, 'tis in the street you must learn it. Both for the
vehicle and for the aims of fine arts, you must frequent the public
square. The people, and not the college, is the writer's home. A
scholar is a candle, which the love and desire of all men will
light. Never his lands or his rents, but the power to charm the
disguised soul that sits veiled under this bearded and that rosy
visage is his rent and ration. His products are as needful as those of
the baker or the weaver. Society cannot do without cultivated men. As
soon as the first wants are satisfied, the