,--where the arts, such as they have, are all imported, having no
indigenous life,--where the laborer is not secured in the earnings of his
own hands,--where suffrage is not free or equal,--that country is, in all
these respects, not civil, but barbarous; and no advantages of soil,
climate, or coast can resist these suicidal mischiefs.

Morality and all the incidents of morality are essential: as, justice to
the citizen and personal liberty. Montesquieu says: "Countries are well
cultivated, not as they are fertile, but as they are free"; and the remark
holds not less, but more true, of the culture of men, than of the tillage
of land. And the highest proof of civility is, that the whole public
action of the State is directed on securing the greatest good of the
greatest number.

ILLUSIONS[15]

Flow, flow the waves hated,
Accursed, adored,
The waves of mutation:
No anchorage is.
Sleep is not, death is not;
Who seem to die, live.
House you were born in,
Friends of your spring-time,
Old man and young maid,
Day's toil and its guerdon--
They are all vanishing,
Fleeing to fables,
Cannot be moored.
See the stars through them,
Through treacherous marbles.
Know, the stars yonder,
The stars everlasting
Are fugitive also,
And emulate, vaulted,
The lambent heat-lightning,
And fire-fly's flight.
When thou dost return
On the wave's circulation,
Beholding the shimmer,
The will's dissipation,
And, out of endeavor
To change and to flow,
The gas become solid,
And phantoms and nothings
Return to be things,
And endless imbroglio
Is law and the world,--
Then first shalt thou know,
That in the wild turmoil,
Horsed on the Proteus,
Thou ridest to power,
And to endurance.

Some years ago, in company with an agreeable party, I spent a long summer
day in exploring the Mammoth Cave in Kentucky. We traversed, through
spacious galleries affording a solid masonry foundation for the town and
county overhead, the six or eight black miles from the mouth of the cavern
to the innermost recess which tourists visit--a niche or grotto made of
one seamless stalactite and called, I believe, Serena's Bower. I lost the
light of one day. I saw high domes, and bottomless pits; heard the voice
of unseen waterfalls; paddled three quarters of a mile in the deep Echo
River, whose waters are peopled with the blind fish; crossed the streams
"Lethe" and "Styx"; plied