The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12,
October, 1858, by Various

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Title: The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858

Author: Various

Release Date: December 11, 2003 [eBook #10435]
[Date last updated: July 2, 2005]

Language: English

Character set encoding: US-ASCII

***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY, VOLUME 2,
ISSUE 12, OCTOBER, 1858***

E-text prepared by Joshua Hutchinson, Keith M. Eckrich, and Project
Gutenberg Distributed Proofreaders

THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY.

A MAGAZINE OF LITERATURE, ART, AND POLITICS.

VOL. II.--OCTOBER, 1858.--NO. XII.

THE NEW WORLD AND THE NEW MAN.

Half a dozen rivulets leap down the western declivity of the Rocky
Mountains, and unite; four thousand miles away the mighty Missouri
debouches into the Mexican Gulf as the result of that junction. Did the
rivulets propose or plan the river? Not at all; but they knew, each,
its private need to find a lower level; the universal law they obeyed
accomplished the rest. So is it with the great human streams. Mighty
beginnings do not lie in the minds of the beginners. History is a
perpetual surprise, ever developing results of which men were the
agents without being the expectants. Individual actors, with respect to
the master claim of humanity, are, for the most part, not unlike that
fleet hound which, enticed by a tempting prospect of meat, outran a
locomotive engine all the way from Lowell to Boston, and won a handsome
wager for his owner, while intent only on a dinner for himself.
Humanity is served out of all proportion to the intention of service.
Even the noble souls, never wanting in history, who follow not a bait,
but belief, see only in imperfect survey the connections and relations
of their deeds. Each is faithfully obeying his own inward vocation, a
voice unheard by other soul than his own, and the inability to
calculate consequences makes the preeminent grandeur of his position;
or he is urged by the high inevitable impulse to publish or verify an
idea: the Divine Destiny _works_ in their hearts, and _plans_ over
their heads.

Socrates felt a sacred impulse to test his nei