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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
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