However new
and astonishing one's surroundings, the tendency is to become a part of
them so soon that almost from the first the power to see them
objectively and fully measure their strangeness, is lost. That power,
already dulled in my case, the pages of Dickens restored by carrying me
back through their associations to the standpoint of my former life.

With a clearness which I had not been able before to attain, I saw now
the past and present, like contrasting pictures, side by side.

The genius of the great novelist of the nineteenth century, like that
of Homer, might indeed defy time; but the setting of his pathetic
tales, the misery of the poor, the wrongs of power, the pitiless
cruelty of the system of society, had passed away as utterly as Circe
and the sirens, Charybdis and Cyclops.

During the hour or two that I sat there with Dickens open before me, I
did not actually read more than a couple of pages. Every paragraph,
every phrase, brought up some new aspect of the world-transformation
which had taken place, and led my thoughts on long and widely ramifying
excursions. As meditating thus in Dr. Leete's library I gradually
attained a more clear and coherent idea of the prodigious spectacle
which I had been so strangely enabled to view, I was filled with a
deepening wonder at the seeming capriciousness of the fate that had
given to one who so little deserved it, or seemed in any way set apart
for it, the power alone among his contemporaries to stand upon the
earth in this latter day. I had neither foreseen the new world nor
toiled for it, as many about me had done regardless of the scorn of
fools or the misconstruction of the good. Surely it would have been
more in accordance with the fitness of things had one of those
prophetic and strenuous souls been enabled to see the travail of his
soul and be satisfied; he, for example, a thousand times rather than I,
who, having beheld in a vision the world I looked on, sang of it in
words that again and again, during these last wondrous days, had rung
in my mind:

For I dipt into the future, far as human eye could see,
Saw the vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be
Till the war-drum throbbed no longer, and the battle-flags were furled.
In the Parliament of man, the federation of the world.

Then the common sense of most shall hold a fretful realm in awe,
And the kindly earth shall slumber, lapt in universal law.
For I doubt not through