st. All possible ideas would then be served up in all possible ways
for all men, who could order them according to their appetites, and we
could dispense with cooks ever after. The written word would be the
finished record of all possible worlds, in gross and in detail.

But the problem whose solution has thus been attempted by desperate
suggestions has, by changing its elements, nullified our calculation. We
have been plotting to cast out the demon of books; and, lo! three other
kindred demons of quarterlies, monthlies, and newspapers have joined
fellowship with it, and our latter estate is worse than our first.
Indeed, we may anticipate the speedy fossilization and extinction of
books, while these younger broods alone shall occupy the earth. Our
libraries are already hardly more than museums, they will soon be
_mausoleums_, while all our reading is of the winged words of the
hurried contributor. Some of the most intelligent and influential men in
large cities do not read a book once a year. The Cadmean magic has
passed from the hands of hierophants into those of the people.
Literature has fallen from the domain of immortal thought to that of
ephemeral speech, from the conditions of a fine to those of a mechanical
art. The order of genius has been abolished by an all-prevailing popular
opinion. The elegance and taste of patient culture have been vulgarized
by forced contact with the unpresentable facts thrust upon us by the
ready writer. Everybody now sighs for the new periodical, while nobody
has read the literature of any single age in any single country.

How like mountain-billows of barbarism do the morning journals, reeking
with unkempt facts, roll in upon the peaceful thought of the soul! How
like savage hordes from some remote star, some nebulous chaos, that has
never yet been recognized in the cosmical world, do they trample upon
the organic and divine growths of culture, laying waste the well-ordered
and fairly adorned fields of the mind, demolishing the intellectual
highways which great engineering thinkers have constructed within us,
and reducing a domain in which poetry and philosophy, with their sacred
broods, dwelt gloriously together, to an undistinguishable level of
ruin! How helpless are we before a newspaper! We sit down to it a highly
developed and highly civilized being; we leave it a barbarian. Step by
step, blow by blow, has everything that was nobly formed within us been
knocked down, and we are