deep sense of suffering, flying from their Northern
wastes to the happy gardens of the South. In no other way can you
account for these movements. If you attribute them to ferocity, what
was it that engendered and nourished _that_? Call them the results of
a Divine Providence, seeking by a fresher current of life to revive
systems of civilization which through long ages of luxury have come to
frailty,--still it was through this severity of discipline alone that
Providence accomplished its end. Besides, these nomads were fully
conscious of their bitter lot; and those who fled not in space fled at
least in their dreams,--waiting for death at last to introduce them to
inexhaustible hunting-grounds in their happy Elysium.

The very mention of Rome suggests the same continually repeated series
of antecedent tragedy and consequent wandering,--pointing backward to
the fabled siege of Troy and the flight of Aeneas,--"_profugus_"
from Asia to Italy,--and forward to the quick-coming footsteps of the
Northern _profugi_, who were eager, even this side the grave, to enter
the Valhalla of their dreams.

It is said that the Phoenician cities sent out colonies from a desire of
gain, and because they were crowded at home. It is said, too, that,
in search of gold, thousands upon thousands went to El Dorado, to
California, and Australia; but who does not know that the greater part
of these thousands left their homes for reasons which, if fully exposed,
would reveal a tragedy in view of which gold appears a glittering
mockery?

The great movement of the race westward is but an extension of this
epic flight. Thus, the Pilgrim Fathers of New England,--the grandest
_profugi_ of all time,--or even the bold adventurers of Spain, would
have been moved only by intense suffering, in some form, to exchange
their homes for a wilderness.

The world is full of these wanderings, under various pretences of gain,
adventure, or curiosity, hiding the real impulse of flight. So with the
strong-flowing current in the streets of a great city; for how else
shall we interpret this intricate net-work of human feature and
movement,--this flux of life toward some troubled centre, and then its
reflux toward some uncertain and undefined circumference?

And as Nature is the mirror of human life, so at the source of those
vast movements by which she buries in oblivion her own works and the
works of man there is hidden the type of human suffering, both for the
r