or their entertainment. We are like schoolboys with eyes out at
the windows, drawn by some rattle of drum and squeak of fife, who would
study, were they but deaf. Reproach sleep as a waste, forsooth! It is
this tyrannical attraction to the surface, that indeed robs us of time,
and defrauds us of the uses of life. We cannot hear the gods for the
buzzing of flies. We are driven to an idle industry,--the idlest of all
things.

And to this description of loss men are nowadays peculiarly exposed.
The modern world is all battle-field; the smoke, the dust, the din fill
every eye and ear; and the hill-top of Lucretius, where is it? The
indispensable, terrible newspaper, with its late allies, the Titans and
sprites of steam and electricity,--bringing to each retired nook,
and thrusting in upon each otherwise peaceful household, the crimes,
follies, fears, solicitudes, doubts, problems of all kingdoms and
peoples,--exasperates the former Scotch mist of impressions into a
flooding rain, and almost threatens to swamp the brain of mankind. The
incitement to thought is ever greater; but the possibility of thinking,
especially of thinking in a deep, simple, central way, is ever less.
Problems multiply, but how to attend to them is ever a still greater
problem. Guests of the intellect and imagination accumulate until the
master of the house is pushed out of doors, and hospitality ceases from
the mere excess of its occasion. That must be a greater than Homer who
should now do Homer's work. He, there in his sweet, deep-skied Ionia,
privileged with an experience so simple and yet so salient and powerful,
might well hope to act upon this victoriously by his spirit, might hope
to transmute it, as indeed he did, into melodious and enduring human
suggestion. Would it have been all the same, had he lived in our
type-setting modern world, with its multitudinous knowledges, its
aroused conscience, its spurred and yet thwarted sympathies, its new
incitements to egotism also, and new tools and appliances for egotism
to use,--placed, as it were, in the focus of a vast whispering-gallery,
where all the sounds of heaven and earth came crowding, contending,
incessant upon his ear? One sees at a glance how the serious thought and
poetry of Greece cling to a few master facts, not being compelled to
fight always with the many-headed monster of detail; and this suggests
to me that our literature may fall short of Grecian amplitude, depth,
and simplicity,