r its lightning to keep
pace with the eye. Many books are born of mere vagueness and cloudiness
of thought. All such, when thus compressed into their reality, would go
out in eternal night. There is something overpowering in the conception
of the high pressure to which life in all its departments may some time
be brought. The mechanism of reading and writing would be slight. The
mental labor of comprehending would be immense. The mind, instead of
being subdued, would be spurred, by what it works in. We are now cramped
and checked by the overwhelming amount of linguistic red-tape in which
we have to operate; but then men, freed from these bonds, the husks of
thought almost all thrown away, would be purer, live faster, do greater,
die younger. What magnificent physical improvements, we may suppose,
will then aid the powers of the soul! The old world would then be
subdued, nevermore to strike a blow at its lithe conqueror, man. The
department of the newspaper, with inconceivable photographic and
telegraphic resources, may then be extended to the solar or the stellar
systems, and the turmoils of all creation would be reported at our
breakfast-tables. Men would rise every morning to take an intelligible
account of the aspects and the prospects of the universe.

Or, once more: shall we venture into the speculative domain of the
philosophy of history, and give the rationale of our times? What is the
divine mission of the great marvel of our age, namely, its periodical
and fugitive literature? The intellectual and moral world of mankind
reforms itself at the outset of new civilizations, as Nature reforms
itself at every new geological epoch. The first step toward a reform, as
toward a crystallization, is a solution. There was a solvent period
between the unknown Orient and the greatness of Greece, between the
Classic and the Middle Ages,--and now humanity is again solvent, in the
transition from the traditions which issued out of feudalism to the
novelty of democratic crystallization. But as the youth of all animals
is prolonged in proportion to their dignity in the scale of being, so is
it with the children of history. Destiny is the longest-lived of all
things. We are not going to accomplish it all at once. We have got to
fight for it, to endure the newspapers in behalf of it. We are in a
place where gravitation changing goes the other way. For the first time,
all reigning ideas now find their focus in the popular mind. The gi