e intelligences of music.

Meanwhile, I had forgotten that Sir Walter Raleigh's century knew
nothing of gas-light, and that it would require a prodigious and
wasteful expenditure of tallow-candles to illuminate the Tunnel
sufficiently to discern even a ghost. On this account, however, it would
be all the more suitable place of confinement for a metaphysician, to
keep him from bewildering mankind with his shadowy speculations; and,
being shut off from external converse, the dark corridor would help
him to make rich discoveries in those cavernous regions and mysterious
by-paths of the intellect, which he had so long accustomed himself to
explore. But how would every successive age rejoice in so secure a
habitation for its reformers, and especially for each best and wisest
man that happened to be then alive! He seeks to burn up our whole system
of society, under pretence of purifying it from its abuses! Away with
him into the Tunnel, and let him begin by setting the Thames on fire, if
he is able!

If not precisely these, yet akin to these were some of the fantasies
that haunted me as I passed under the river: for the place is suggestive
of such idle and irresponsible stuff by its own abortive character, its
lack of whereabout on upper earth, or any solid foundation of realities.
Could I have looked forward a few years, I might have regretted that
American enterprise had not provided a similar tunnel, under the Hudson
or the Potomac, for the convenience of our National Government in times
hardly yet gone by. It would be delightful to clap up all the enemies
of our peace and Union in the dark together, and there let them abide,
listening to the monotonous roll of the river above their heads, or
perhaps in a state of miraculously suspended animation, until,--be it
after months, years, or centuries,--when the turmoil shall be all over,
the Wrong washed away in blood, (since that must needs be the cleansing
fluid,) and the Right firmly rooted in the soil which that blood will
have enriched, they might crawl forth again and catch a single glimpse
at their redeemed country, and feel it to be a better land than they
deserve, and die!

I was not sorry when the daylight reached me after a much briefer
abode in the nether regions than, I fear, would await the troublesome
personages just hinted at. Emerging on the Surrey side of the Thames,
I found myself in Rotherhithe, a neighborhood not unfamiliar to the
readers of old books of