re
is a mean wonder, as of a child who sees a juggler tossing golden
balls, and this is base, if you will. But do you think that the wonder
is ignoble, or the sensation less, with which every human soul is
called to watch the golden balls of heaven tossed through the night by
the Hand that made them? There is a mean curiosity, as of a child
opening a forbidden door, or a servant prying into her master's
business;--and a noble curiosity, questioning, in the front of danger,
the source of the great river beyond the sand,--the place of the great
continents beyond the sea;--a nobler curiosity still, which questions
of the source of the River of Life, and of the space of the Continent
of Heaven,--things which "the angels desire to look into." So the
anxiety is ignoble, with which you linger over the course and
catastrophe of an idle tale; but do you think the anxiety is less, or
greater, with which you watch, or _ought_ to watch, the dealings of
fate and destiny with the life of an agonized nation? Alas! it is the
narrowness, selfishness, minuteness, of your sensation that you have to
deplore in England at this day;--sensation which spends itself in
bouquets and speeches; in revelings and junketings; in sham fights and
gay puppet shows, while you can look on and see noble nations murdered,
man by man, without an effort or a tear.

30. I said "minuteness" and "selfishness" of sensation, but in a word,
I ought to have said "injustice" or "unrighteousness" of sensation.
For as in nothing is a gentleman better to be discerned from a vulgar
person, so in nothing is a gentle nation (such nations have been)
better to be discerned from a mob, than in this,--that their feelings
are constant and just, results of due contemplation, and of equal
thought. You can talk a mob into anything; its feelings may
be--usually are--on the whole, generous and right; but it has no
foundation for them, no hold of them; you may tease or tickle it into
any, at your pleasure; it thinks by infection, for the most part,
catching an opinion like a cold, and there is nothing so little that it
will not roar itself wild about, when the fit is on;--nothing so great
but it will forget in an hour, when the fit is past. But a gentleman's
or a gentle nation's, passions are just, measured and continuous. A
great nation, for instance, does not spend its entire national wits for
a couple of months in weighing evidence of a single ruffian's having
done a sing