to degrade to-day; a good deal of buzz, and
somewhere a result slipped magically in. Every roof is agreeable to
the eye until it is lifted; then we find tragedy and moaning women and
hard-eyed husbands and deluges of lethe, and the men ask, 'What's the
news?' as if the old were so bad. How many individuals can we count in
society? how many actions? how many opinions? So much of our time is
preparation, so much is routine, and so much retrospect, that the pith
of each man's genius contracts itself to a very few hours. The
history of literature--take the net result of Tiraboschi, Warton, or
Schlegel,--is a sum of very few ideas and of very few original tales;
all the rest being variation of these. So in this great society wide
lying around us, a critical analysis would find very few spontaneous
actions. It is almost all custom and gross sense. There are even few
opinions, and these seem organic in the speakers, and do not disturb the
universal necessity.

What opium is instilled into all disaster! It shows formidable as we
approach it, but there is at last no rough rasping friction, but the
most slippery sliding surfaces. We fall soft on a thought; Ate Dea is
gentle,--

"Over men's heads walking aloft,
With tender feet treading so soft."

People grieve and bemoan themselves, but it is not half so bad with them
as they say. There are moods in which we court suffering, in the hope
that here at least we shall find reality, sharp peaks and edges of
truth. But it turns out to be scene-painting and counterfeit. The only
thing grief has taught me is to know how shallow it is. That, like all
the rest, plays about the surface, and never introduces me into the
reality, for contact with which we would even pay the costly price of
sons and lovers. Was it Boscovich who found out that bodies never come
in contact? Well, souls never touch their objects. An innavigable
sea washes with silent waves between us and the things we aim at and
converse with. Grief too will make us idealists. In the death of my son,
now more than two years ago, I seem to have lost a beautiful estate,--no
more. I cannot get it nearer to me. If to-morrow I should be informed of
the bankruptcy of my principal debtors, the loss of my property would be
a great inconvenience to me, perhaps, for many years; but it would
leave me as it found me,--neither better nor worse. So is it with this
calamity: it does not touch me; something which I fancied was a pa