are events of importance whose interval is to us a true historic period.
The lecturer is wont to describe the nineteenth century, the American of the last generation, in an off-hand and triumphant strain, wafting him to Paradise, spreading his fame by steam and telegraph, recounting the number of wooden stopples he has whittled. But he does not perceive that this is not a sincere or pertinent account of any man's or nation's life. It is the hip-hip-hurrah and mutual admiration society style. Cars go by and we know their substance as well as their shadow! They stop and we get into them. But those sublime thoughts, passing on high, do not stop, and we never get into them. Their conductor is not like one of us.
I feel that the man who, in his conversation with me about the life of man in New England, lays much stress on railroads, telegraphs, and such enterprises does not go below the surface of things. . . . . In one of the mind's avatars, in the interval between sleeping and waking, aye, in one of the interstices of a Hindoo dynasty, perchance, such things as the nineteenth century, with all its improvements, may come and go again. Nothing makes a deep and lasting impression but what is weighty. . . . . He who lives according to the highest
