eing sedentary men, will chiefly congregate into one
part of the procession and march under similar banners of disease; but
among them we may observe here and there a sickly student, who has left
his health between the leaves of classic volumes; and clerks, likewise,
who have caught their deaths on high official stools; and men of genius
too, who have written sheet after sheet with pens dipped in their
heart's blood. These are a wretched quaking, short-breathed set. But
what is this cloud of pale-cheeked, slender girls, who disturb the ear
with the multiplicity of their short, dry coughs? They are
seamstresses, who have plied the daily and nightly needle in the
service of master tailors and close-fisted contractors, until now it is
almost time for each to hem the borders of her own shroud. Consumption
points their place in the procession. With their sad sisterhood are
intermingled many youthful maidens who have sickened in aristocratic
mansions, and for whose aid science has unavailingly searched its
volumes, and whom breathless love has watched. In our ranks the rich
maiden and the poor seamstress may walk arm in arm. We might find
innumerable other instances, where the bond of mutual disease--not to
speak of nation-sweeping pestilence--embraces high and low, and makes
the king a brother of the clown. But it is not hard to own that disease
is the natural aristocrat. Let him keep his state, and have his
established orders of rank, and wear his royal mantle of the color of a
fever flush and let the noble and wealthy boast their own physical
infirmities, and display their symptoms as the badges of high station.
All things considered, these are as proper subjects of human pride as
any relations of human rank that men can fix upon.

Sound again, thou deep-breathed trumpeter! and herald, with thy voice
of might, shout forth another summons that shall reach the old baronial
castles of Europe, and the rudest cabin of our western wilderness! What
class is next to take its place in the procession of mortal life? Let
it be those whom the gifts of intellect have united in a noble
brotherhood.

Ay, this is a reality, before which the conventional distinctions of
society melt away like a vapor when we would grasp it with the hand.
Were Byron now alive, and Burns, the first would come from his
ancestral abbey, flinging aside, although unwillingly, the inherited
honors of a thousand years, to take the arm of the mighty peasant who
g