er does the mind, as
sympathetic priest and interpreter, hover amid the phenomena of time and
space; for the forms of Nature have given place to volumes, there are no
objects but pages, and passions have been supplanted by paragraphs. We
no longer see the whirling universe, or feel the pulsing of life.
Thought itself has ceased to be a sprite, and flows through the mind
only in the leaden shape of printed sentences. The symbolism of letters
is over us all. An all-pervading nominalism has completely masked
whatsoever there is that is real. More and more it is not the soul and
Nature, but the eye and print, whose resultant is thought. Nature
disappears and the mind withers. No other faculty has been developed in
man but that of the reader, no other possibility but that of the writer.
The old-fashioned arts which used to imply human nature, which used to
blossom instinctively, which have given joy and beauty to society, are
fading from the face of the earth. Where are the ancient and mediaeval
popular games, those charming vital symptoms? The people now read
Dickens and Longfellow. Where are the old-fashioned instincts of worship
and love, consolation and mourning? The people have since found an
antidote for these experiences in Blair and Tupper, and other authors of
renown. Where are those weird voices of the air and forest and stream,
those symptoms of an enchanted Nature, which used to thrill and bless
the soul of man? The duller ear of men has failed to hear them in this
age of popular science.

Literature, using the word with a benevolent breadth of meaning which
excludes no pretenders, is the result of the invasion of letters. It is
the fort which they occupy, which with too hasty consideration has
usually been regarded as friendly to the human race. Religions, laws,
sciences, arts, theories, and histories, instead of passing Ariel-like
into the elements when their task is done, are made perpetual prisoners
in the alcoves of dreary libraries. They have a fossil immortality,
surviving themselves in covers, as poems have survived minstrels. The
memory of man is made omni-capacious; its burden increases with every
generation; not even the ignorance and stolidity of the past are allowed
the final grace of being forgotten; and omniscience is becoming at once
more and more impossible and more and more fashionable. Whoever reads
only the books of his own time is superficial in proportion to the
thickness of the ages. But ne