to a natural
phenomenon. A little thought is sexton to all the world.

I hardly know an _intellectual_ man, even, who is so broad and truly
liberal that you can think aloud in his society. Most with whom you
endeavor to talk soon come to a stand against some institution in which
they appear to hold stock,--that is, some particular, not universal, way
of viewing things. They will continually thrust their own low roof, with
its narrow skylight, between you and the sky, when it is the
unobstructed heavens you would view. Get out of the way with your
cobwebs, wash your windows, I say! In some lyceums they tell me that
they have voted to exclude the subject of religion. But how do I know
what their religion is, and when I am near to or far from it? I have
walked into such an arena and done my best to make a clean breast of
what religion I have experienced, and the audience never suspected what
I was about. The lecture was as harmless as moonshine to them. Whereas,
if I had read to them the biography of the greatest scamps in history,
they might have thought that I had written the lives of the deacons of
their church. Ordinarily, the inquiry is, Where did you come from? or,
Where are you going? That was a more pertinent question which I
overheard one of my auditors put to another once.--"What does he lecture
for?" It made me quake in my shoes.

To speak impartially, the best men that I know are not serene, a world
in themselves. For the most part, they dwell in forms, and flatter and
study effect only more finely than the rest. We select granite for the
underpinning of our houses and barns; we build fences of stone; but we
do not ourselves rest on an underpinning of granitic truth, the lowest
primitive rock. Our sills are rotten. What stuff is the man made of who
is not coexistent in our thought with the purest and subtilest truth? I
often accuse my finest acquaintances of an immense frivolity; for, while
there are manners and compliments we do not meet, we do not teach one
another the lessons of honesty and sincerity that the brutes do, or of
steadiness and solidity that the rocks do. The fault is commonly mutual,
however; for we do not habitually demand any more of each other.

That excitement about Kossuth, consider how characteristic, but
superficial, it was!--only another kind of politics or dancing. Men were
making speeches to him all over the country, but each expressed only the
thought, or the want of thought, of t