orner to see the world blow up.

All summer, and far into the autumn, perchance, you unconsciously went
by the newspapers and the news, and now you find it was because the
morning and the evening were full of news to you. Your walks were full
of incidents. You attended, not to the affairs of Europe, but to your
own affairs in Massachusetts fields. If you chance to live and move and
have your being in that thin stratum in which the events that make the
news transpire,--thinner than the paper on which it is printed,--then
these things will fill the world for you; but if you soar above or dive
below that plane, you cannot remember nor be reminded of them. Really to
see the sun rise or go down every day, so to relate ourselves to a
universal fact, would preserve us sane forever. Nations! What are
nations? Tartars, and Huns, and Chinamen! Like insects, they swarm. The
historian strives in vain to make them memorable. It is for want of a
man that there are so many men. It is individuals that populate the
world. Any man thinking may say with the Spirit of Lodin,--

"I look down from my height on nations,
And they become ashes before me;--
Calm is my dwelling in the clouds;
Pleasant are the great fields of my rest."

Pray, let us live without being drawn by dogs, Esquimaux-fashion,
tearing over hill and dale, and biting each other's ears.

Not without a slight shudder at the danger, I often perceive how near I
had come to admitting into my mind the details of some trivial
affair,--the news of the street; and I am astonished to observe how
willing men are to lumber their minds with such rubbish,--to permit idle
rumors and incidents of the most insignificant kind to intrude on ground
which should be sacred to thought. Shall the mind be a public arena,
where the affairs of the street and the gossip of the tea-table chiefly
are discussed? Or shall it be a quarter of heaven itself,--an hypaethral
temple, consecrated to the service of the gods? I find it so difficult
to dispose of the few facts which to me are significant, that I hesitate
to burden my attention with those which are insignificant, which only a
divine mind could illustrate. Such is, for the most part, the news in
newspapers and conversation. It is important to preserve the mind's
chastity in this respect. Think of admitting the details of a single
case of the criminal court into our thoughts, to stalk profanely through
their very _sanctum sanctorum_