or
trowel of the Egyptians,[256] or the pen of Moses,[257] or Dante,[258]
but different from all these. Not possible will the soul all rich, all
eloquent, with thousand-cloven tongue, deign to repeat itself; but if
you can hear what these patriarchs say, surely you can reply to them in
the same pitch of voice; for the ear and the tongue are two organs of
one nature. Abide in the simple and noble regions of thy life, obey thy
heart, and thou shalt reproduce the Foreworld[259] again.

4. As our Religion, our Education, our Art look abroad, so does our
spirit of society. All men plume themselves on the improvement of
society, and no man improves.

Society never advances. It recedes as fast on one side as it gains on
the other. It undergoes continual changes; it is barbarous, it is
civilized, it is Christianized, it is rich, it is scientific; but this
change is not amelioration. For everything that is given, something is
taken. Society acquires new arts, and loses old instincts. What a
contrast between the well-clad, reading, writing, thinking American,
with a watch, a pencil, and a bill of exchange in his pocket, and the
naked New Zealander,[260] whose property is a club, a spear, a mat,
and an undivided twentieth of a shed to sleep under! But compare the
health of the two men, and you shall see that the white man has lost
his aboriginal strength. If the traveler tell us truly, strike the
savage with a broad ax, and in a day or two the flesh shall unite and
heal as if you struck the blow into soft pitch, and the same blow
shall send the white to his grave.

The civilized man has built a coach, but has lost the use of his feet.
He is supported on crutches, but lacks so much support of muscle. He
has a fine Geneva[261] watch, but he fails of the skill to tell the
hour by the sun. A Greenwich nautical almanac[262] he has, and so
being sure of the information when he wants it, the man in the street
does not know a star in the sky. The solstice[263] he does not
observe; the equinox he knows as little; and the whole bright calendar
of the year is without a dial in his mind. His notebooks impair his
memory; his libraries overload his wit; the insurance office increases
the number of accidents; and it may be a question whether machinery
does not encumber; whether we have not lost by refinement some
energy, by a Christianity intrenched in establishments and forms, some
vigor of wild virtue. For every Stoic was a Stoic; but in C