nd unsympathetic; and a sensible, that is, a sensitive, stomach
understands it to be demoralized by the monstrous krakens which are
viciously brooding in its depths. (If the pronoun "it," in the last
sentence, should refer to stomach, the sense will still be clear.) In
fact, this water has been left over from the making of the earth: like
the Dodo and the Moa, it should have evaporated. How pleasant it is to
be assured by Sir Charles Lyell that the land is still rising in so many
quarters of the globe! for we may anticipate that millennial epoch when
there shall be "no more sea."

However, the old impression which great spaces used to make upon the
imagination gives way to the new sensation of annihilating spaces. It
would be more correct now to speak of differences than of distances. The
difference between one country and another is all that now makes the
distance between them. For man is now overcoming space faster than he is
obliterating national peculiarities. And when one goes abroad, the
universal humanity in whose interest all material and political
triumphs are gained is not felt by him so soon as the specific
divergence which makes the character of lands and people. Oaks and elms,
hawthorn and beeches, are on either side the ocean; but you measure the
voyage by their unlikeness to each other, and wonder how soon you have
got so far. The strawberry ripens with a different flavor and texture.
The sun is less racy in all the common garden-stuff whose names we know.
Pears and peaches we are disappointed in recognizing; they seem as if
ripened by the sun's proxy, the moon; and our boys would hardly pick up
the apples in the fields. But England undulates with grass that seems to
fix the fluent color of the greenest waves on either hand. And our
eagle-eyed blue sky droops its lid over the island, as the moisture
gathers, with a more equable compassion than we know for all shrubs and
blades and grazing cattle.

Both the pain and the tonic in being absent from your home and country
are administered by difference. In gulping that three thousand miles the
taste is austere, but the stimulus is wholesome. We learn to appreciate,
but also to correct, the fare we have at home.

The difference is twofold between England and America. England differs,
first, in the inveterate way in which the people hold on to all that
they have inherited; second, in the gradual, but equally inveterate, way
in which they labor to improve their