Sin has many tools, but a lie is the handle which fits them all.
—I think, Sir,—said the divinity-student,—you must intend that for one of
the sayings of the Seven Wise Men of Boston you were speaking of the
other day.
I thank you, my young friend,—was my reply,—but I must say something
better than that, before I could pretend to fill out the number.
—The schoolmistress wanted to know how many of these sayings there were
on record, and what, and by whom said.
—Why, let us see,—there is that one of Benjamin Franklin, “the great
Bostonian,” after whom this lad was named. To be sure, he said a great
many wise things,—and I don’t feel sure he didn’t borrow this,—he speaks
as if it were old. But then he applied it so neatly!—
“He that has once done you a kindness will be more ready to do you
another than he whom you yourself have obliged.”
Then there is that glorious Epicurean paradox, uttered by my friend, the
Historian, in one of his flashing moments:—
“Give us the luxuries of life, and we will dispense with its
necessaries.”
To these must certainly be added that other saying of one of the wittiest
of men:—
“Good Americans, when they die, go to Paris.”—
The divinity-student looked grave at this, but said nothing.
The schoolmistress spoke out, and said she didn’t think the wit meant any
irreverence. It was only another way of saying, Paris is a heavenly
place after New York or Boston.
A jaunty-looking person, who had come in with the young fellow they call
John,—evidently a stranger,—said there was one more wise man’s saying
that he had heard; it was about our place, but he didn’t know who said
it.—A civil curiosity was manifested by the company to hear the fourth
wise saying. I heard him distinctly whispering to the young fellow who
brought him to dinner, Shall I tell it? To which the answer was, Go
ahead!—Well,—he said,—this was what I heard:—
“Boston State-House is the hub of the solar system. You couldn’t pry
that out of a Boston man if you had the tire of all creation straightened
out for a crowbar.”
Sir,—said I,—I am gratified with your remark. It expresses with pleasing
vivacity that which I have sometimes heard uttered with malignant
dulness. The satire of the remark is essentially true of Boston,—and of
all other considerable—and inconsiderable—places with which I have had
the privilege of being acquainted. Cockneys think London is the only
place in the world. Frenchmen—you remember the line about Paris, the
Court, the World, etc.—I recollect well, by the way, a sign in that city
which ran thus: “Hôtel l’Univers et des États Unis”; and as Paris is
the universe to a Frenchman, of course the United States are outside of
it.—“See Naples and then die.”—It is quite as bad with smaller places. I
have been about, lecturing, you know, and have found the following
propositions to hold true of all of them.
1. The axis of the earth sticks out visibly through the centre of each
and every town or city.
2. If more than fifty years have passed since its foundation, it is
affectionately styled by the inhabitants the “good old town
of”—(whatever its name may happen to be.)
3. Every collection of its inhabitants that comes together to listen to
a stranger is invariably declared to be a “remarkably intelligent
audience.”
4. The climate of the place is particularly favorable to longevity.
5. It contains several persons of vast talent little known to the world.
(One or two of them, you may perhaps chance to remember, sent short
pieces to the “Pactolian” some time since, which were “respectfully
declined.”)
Boston is just like other places of its size;—only perhaps, considering
its excellent fish-market, paid fire-department, superior monthly
publications, and correct habit of spelling the English language, it has
some right to look down on the mob of cities. I’ll tell you, though, if
you want to know it, what is the real offence of Boston. It drains a
large water-shed of its intellect, and will not itself be drained. If it
would only send away its first-rate men, instead of its second-rate ones,
(no offence to the well-known exceptions, of which we are always proud,)
we should be spared such epigrammatic remarks as that which the gentleman
has quoted. There can never be a real metropolis in this country, until
the biggest centre can drain the lesser ones of their talent and
wealth.—I have observed, by the way, that the people who really live in
two great cities are by no means so jealous of each other, as are those
of smaller cities situated within the intellectual basin, or
suction-range, of one large one, of the pretensions of any other.
Don’t you see why? Because their promising young author and rising
lawyer and large capitalist have been drained off to the neighboring big
city,—their prettiest girl has been exported to the same market; all
their ambition points there, and all their thin gilding of glory comes
from there. I hate little toad-eating cities.
—Would I be so good as to specify any particular example?—Oh,—an example?
Did you ever see a bear-trap? Never? Well, shouldn’t you like to see me
put my foot into one? With sentiments of the highest consideration I
must beg leave to be excused.
Besides, some of the smaller cities are charming. If they have an old
church or two, a few stately mansions of former grandees, here and there
an old dwelling with the second story projecting, (for the convenience of
shooting the Indians knocking at the front-door with their tomahawks,)—if
they have, scattered about, those mighty square houses built something
more than half a century ago, and standing like architectural boulders
dropped by the former diluvium of wealth, whose refluent wave has left
them as its monument,—if they have gardens with elbowed apple-trees that
push their branches over the high board-fence and drop their fruit on the
side-walk,—if they have a little grass in the side-streets, enough to
betoken quiet without proclaiming decay,—I think I could go to pieces,
after my life’s work were done, in one of those tranquil places, as
sweetly as in any cradle that an old man may be rocked to sleep in. I
visit such spots always with infinite delight. My friend, the Poet,
says, that rapidly growing towns are most unfavorable to the imaginative
and reflective faculties. Let a man live in one of these old quiet
places, he says, and the wine of his soul, which is kept thick and turbid
by the rattle of busy streets, settles, and, as you hold it up, you may
see the sun through it by day and the stars by night.
—Do I think that the little villages have the conceit of the great
towns?—I don’t believe there is much difference. You know how they read
Pope’s line in the smallest town in our State of Massachusetts?—Well,
they read it
“All are but parts of one stupendous HULL!”
—Every person’s feelings have a front-door and a side-door by which they
may be entered. The front-door is on the street. Some keep it always
open; some keep it latched; some, locked; some, bolted,—with a chain that
will let you peep in, but not get in; and some nail it up, so that
nothing can pass its threshold. This front-door leads into a passage
which opens into an ante-room, and this into the inferior apartments.
The side-door opens at once into the sacred chambers.
There is almost always at least one key to this side-door. This is
carried for years hidden in a mother’s bosom. Fathers, brothers,
sisters, and friends, often, but by no means so universally, have
duplicates of it. The wedding-ring conveys a right to one; alas, if none
is given with it!
If nature or accident has put one of these keys into the hands of a
person who has the torturing instinct, I can only solemnly pronounce the
words that Justice utters over its doomed victim,—The Lord have mercy on
your soul! You will probably go mad within a reasonable time,—or, if
you are a man, run off and die with your head on a curb-stone, in
Melbourne or San Francisco,—or, if you are a woman, quarrel and break
your heart, or turn into a pale, jointed petrifaction that moves about as
if it were alive, or play some real life-tragedy or other.
Be very careful to whom you trust one of these keys of the side-door.
The fact of possessing one renders those even who are dear to you very
terrible at times. You can keep the world out from your front-door, or
receive visitors only when you are ready for them; but those of your own
flesh and blood, or of certain grades of intimacy, can come in at the
side-door, if they will, at any hour and in any mood. Some of them have
a scale of your whole nervous system, and can play all the gamut of your
sensibilities in semitones,—touching the naked nerve-pulps as a pianist
strikes the keys of his instrument. I am satisfied that there are as
great masters of this nerve-playing as Vieuxtemps or Thalberg in their
lines of performance. Married life is the school in which the most
accomplished artists in this department are found. A delicate woman is
the best instrument; she has such a magnificent compass of sensibilities!
From the deep inward moan which follows pressure on the great nerves of
right, to the sharp cry as the filaments of taste are struck with a
crashing sweep, is a range which no other instrument possesses. A few
exercises on it daily at home fit a man wonderfully for his habitual
labors, and refresh him immensely as he returns from them. No stranger
can get a great many notes of torture out of a human soul; it takes one
that knows it well,—parent, child, brother, sister, intimate. Be very
careful to whom you give a side-door key; too many have them already.
—You remember the old story of the tender-hearted man, who placed a
frozen viper in his bosom, and was stung by it when it became thawed? If
we take a cold-blooded creature into our bosom, better that it should
sting us and we should die than that its chill should slowly steal into
our hearts; warm it we never can! I have seen faces of women that were
fair to look upon, yet one could see that the icicles were forming round
these women’s hearts. I knew what freezing image lay on the white
breasts beneath the laces!
A very simple intellectual mechanism answers the necessities of
friendship, and even of the most intimate relations of life. If a watch
tells us the hour and the minute, we can be content to carry it about
with us for a life-time, though it has no second-hand and is not a
repeater, nor a musical watch,—though it is not enamelled nor
jewelled,—in short, though it has little beyond the wheels required for a
trustworthy instrument, added to a good face and a pair of useful hands.
The more wheels there are in a watch or a brain, the more trouble they
are to take care of. The movements of exaltation which belong to genius
are egotistic by their very nature. A calm, clear mind, not subject to
the spasms and crises which are so often met with in creative or
intensely perceptive natures, is the best basis for love or
friendship.—Observe, I am talking about minds. I won’t say, the more
intellect, the less capacity for loving; for that would do wrong to the
understanding and reason;—but, on the other hand, that the brain often
runs away with the heart’s best blood, which gives the world a few pages
of wisdom or sentiment or poetry, instead of making one other heart
happy, I have no question.
If one’s intimate in love or friendship cannot or does not share all
one’s intellectual tastes or pursuits, that is a small matter.
Intellectual companions can be found easily in men and books. After all,
if we think of it, most of the world’s loves and friendships have been
between people that could not read nor spell.
But to radiate the heat of the affections into a clod which absorbs all
that is poured into it, but never warms beneath the sunshine of smiles or
the pressure of hand or lip,—this is the great martyrdom of sensitive
beings,—most of all in that perpetual auto da fé where young womanhood
is the sacrifice.
—You noticed, perhaps, what I just said about the loves and friendships
of illiterate persons,—that is, of the human race, with a few exceptions
here and there. I like books,—I was born and bred among them, and have
the easy feeling, when I get into their presence, that a stable-boy has
among horses. I don’t think I undervalue them either as companions or as
instructors. But I can’t help remembering that the world’s great men
have not commonly been great scholars, nor its great scholars great men.
The Hebrew patriarchs had small libraries, I think, if any; yet they
represent to our imaginations a very complete idea of manhood, and, I
think, if we could ask in Abraham to dine with us men of letters next
Saturday, we should feel honored by his company.
What I wanted to say about books is this: that there are times in which
every active mind feels itself above any and all human books.
—I think a man must have a good opinion of himself, Sir,—said the
divinity-student,—who should feel himself above Shakspeare at any time.
My young friend,—I replied,—the man who is never conscious of a state of
feeling or of intellectual effort entirely beyond expression by any form
of words whatsoever is a mere creature of language. I can hardly believe
there are any such men. Why, think for a moment of the power of music.
The nerves that make us alive to it spread out (so the Professor tells
me) in the most sensitive region of the marrow just where it is widening
to run upwards into the hemispheres. It has its seat in the region of
sense rather than of thought. Yet it produces a continuous and, as it
were, logical sequence of emotional and intellectual changes; but how
different from trains of thought proper! how entirely beyond the reach of
symbols!—Think of human passions as compared with all phrases! Did you
ever hear of a man’s growing lean by the reading of “Romeo and Juliet,”
or blowing his brains out because Desdemona was maligned? There are a
good many symbols, even, that are more expressive than words. I remember
a young wife who had to part with her husband for a time. She did not
write a mournful poem; indeed, she was a silent person, and perhaps
hardly said a word about it; but she quietly turned of a deep orange
color with jaundice. A great many people in this world have but one form
of rhetoric for their profoundest experiences,—namely, to waste away and
die. When a man can read, his paroxysm of feeling is passing. When he
can read, his thought has slackened its hold.—You talk about reading
Shakspeare, using him as an expression for the highest intellect, and you
wonder that any common person should be so presumptuous as to suppose his
thought can rise above the text which lies before him. But think a
moment. A child’s reading of Shakspeare is one thing, and Coleridge’s or
Schlegel’s reading of him is another. The saturation-point of each mind
differs from that of every other. But I think it is as true for the
small mind which can only take up a little as for the great one which
takes up much, that the suggested trains of thought and feeling ought
always to rise above—not the author, but the reader’s mental version of
the author, whoever he may be.
I think most readers of Shakspeare sometimes find themselves thrown into
exalted mental conditions like those produced by music. Then they may
drop the book, to pass at once into the region of thought without words.
We may happen to be very dull folks, you and I, and probably are, unless
there is some particular reason to suppose the contrary. But we get
glimpses now and then of a sphere of spiritual possibilities, where we,
dull as we are now, may sail in vast circles round the largest compass of
earthly intelligences.
—I confess there are times when I feel like the frien
—I think, Sir,—said the divinity-student,—you must intend that for one of
the sayings of the Seven Wise Men of Boston you were speaking of the
other day.
I thank you, my young friend,—was my reply,—but I must say something
better than that, before I could pretend to fill out the number.
—The schoolmistress wanted to know how many of these sayings there were
on record, and what, and by whom said.
—Why, let us see,—there is that one of Benjamin Franklin, “the great
Bostonian,” after whom this lad was named. To be sure, he said a great
many wise things,—and I don’t feel sure he didn’t borrow this,—he speaks
as if it were old. But then he applied it so neatly!—
“He that has once done you a kindness will be more ready to do you
another than he whom you yourself have obliged.”
Then there is that glorious Epicurean paradox, uttered by my friend, the
Historian, in one of his flashing moments:—
“Give us the luxuries of life, and we will dispense with its
necessaries.”
To these must certainly be added that other saying of one of the wittiest
of men:—
“Good Americans, when they die, go to Paris.”—
The divinity-student looked grave at this, but said nothing.
The schoolmistress spoke out, and said she didn’t think the wit meant any
irreverence. It was only another way of saying, Paris is a heavenly
place after New York or Boston.
A jaunty-looking person, who had come in with the young fellow they call
John,—evidently a stranger,—said there was one more wise man’s saying
that he had heard; it was about our place, but he didn’t know who said
it.—A civil curiosity was manifested by the company to hear the fourth
wise saying. I heard him distinctly whispering to the young fellow who
brought him to dinner, Shall I tell it? To which the answer was, Go
ahead!—Well,—he said,—this was what I heard:—
“Boston State-House is the hub of the solar system. You couldn’t pry
that out of a Boston man if you had the tire of all creation straightened
out for a crowbar.”
Sir,—said I,—I am gratified with your remark. It expresses with pleasing
vivacity that which I have sometimes heard uttered with malignant
dulness. The satire of the remark is essentially true of Boston,—and of
all other considerable—and inconsiderable—places with which I have had
the privilege of being acquainted. Cockneys think London is the only
place in the world. Frenchmen—you remember the line about Paris, the
Court, the World, etc.—I recollect well, by the way, a sign in that city
which ran thus: “Hôtel l’Univers et des États Unis”; and as Paris is
the universe to a Frenchman, of course the United States are outside of
it.—“See Naples and then die.”—It is quite as bad with smaller places. I
have been about, lecturing, you know, and have found the following
propositions to hold true of all of them.
1. The axis of the earth sticks out visibly through the centre of each
and every town or city.
2. If more than fifty years have passed since its foundation, it is
affectionately styled by the inhabitants the “good old town
of”—(whatever its name may happen to be.)
3. Every collection of its inhabitants that comes together to listen to
a stranger is invariably declared to be a “remarkably intelligent
audience.”
4. The climate of the place is particularly favorable to longevity.
5. It contains several persons of vast talent little known to the world.
(One or two of them, you may perhaps chance to remember, sent short
pieces to the “Pactolian” some time since, which were “respectfully
declined.”)
Boston is just like other places of its size;—only perhaps, considering
its excellent fish-market, paid fire-department, superior monthly
publications, and correct habit of spelling the English language, it has
some right to look down on the mob of cities. I’ll tell you, though, if
you want to know it, what is the real offence of Boston. It drains a
large water-shed of its intellect, and will not itself be drained. If it
would only send away its first-rate men, instead of its second-rate ones,
(no offence to the well-known exceptions, of which we are always proud,)
we should be spared such epigrammatic remarks as that which the gentleman
has quoted. There can never be a real metropolis in this country, until
the biggest centre can drain the lesser ones of their talent and
wealth.—I have observed, by the way, that the people who really live in
two great cities are by no means so jealous of each other, as are those
of smaller cities situated within the intellectual basin, or
suction-range, of one large one, of the pretensions of any other.
Don’t you see why? Because their promising young author and rising
lawyer and large capitalist have been drained off to the neighboring big
city,—their prettiest girl has been exported to the same market; all
their ambition points there, and all their thin gilding of glory comes
from there. I hate little toad-eating cities.
—Would I be so good as to specify any particular example?—Oh,—an example?
Did you ever see a bear-trap? Never? Well, shouldn’t you like to see me
put my foot into one? With sentiments of the highest consideration I
must beg leave to be excused.
Besides, some of the smaller cities are charming. If they have an old
church or two, a few stately mansions of former grandees, here and there
an old dwelling with the second story projecting, (for the convenience of
shooting the Indians knocking at the front-door with their tomahawks,)—if
they have, scattered about, those mighty square houses built something
more than half a century ago, and standing like architectural boulders
dropped by the former diluvium of wealth, whose refluent wave has left
them as its monument,—if they have gardens with elbowed apple-trees that
push their branches over the high board-fence and drop their fruit on the
side-walk,—if they have a little grass in the side-streets, enough to
betoken quiet without proclaiming decay,—I think I could go to pieces,
after my life’s work were done, in one of those tranquil places, as
sweetly as in any cradle that an old man may be rocked to sleep in. I
visit such spots always with infinite delight. My friend, the Poet,
says, that rapidly growing towns are most unfavorable to the imaginative
and reflective faculties. Let a man live in one of these old quiet
places, he says, and the wine of his soul, which is kept thick and turbid
by the rattle of busy streets, settles, and, as you hold it up, you may
see the sun through it by day and the stars by night.
—Do I think that the little villages have the conceit of the great
towns?—I don’t believe there is much difference. You know how they read
Pope’s line in the smallest town in our State of Massachusetts?—Well,
they read it
“All are but parts of one stupendous HULL!”
—Every person’s feelings have a front-door and a side-door by which they
may be entered. The front-door is on the street. Some keep it always
open; some keep it latched; some, locked; some, bolted,—with a chain that
will let you peep in, but not get in; and some nail it up, so that
nothing can pass its threshold. This front-door leads into a passage
which opens into an ante-room, and this into the inferior apartments.
The side-door opens at once into the sacred chambers.
There is almost always at least one key to this side-door. This is
carried for years hidden in a mother’s bosom. Fathers, brothers,
sisters, and friends, often, but by no means so universally, have
duplicates of it. The wedding-ring conveys a right to one; alas, if none
is given with it!
If nature or accident has put one of these keys into the hands of a
person who has the torturing instinct, I can only solemnly pronounce the
words that Justice utters over its doomed victim,—The Lord have mercy on
your soul! You will probably go mad within a reasonable time,—or, if
you are a man, run off and die with your head on a curb-stone, in
Melbourne or San Francisco,—or, if you are a woman, quarrel and break
your heart, or turn into a pale, jointed petrifaction that moves about as
if it were alive, or play some real life-tragedy or other.
Be very careful to whom you trust one of these keys of the side-door.
The fact of possessing one renders those even who are dear to you very
terrible at times. You can keep the world out from your front-door, or
receive visitors only when you are ready for them; but those of your own
flesh and blood, or of certain grades of intimacy, can come in at the
side-door, if they will, at any hour and in any mood. Some of them have
a scale of your whole nervous system, and can play all the gamut of your
sensibilities in semitones,—touching the naked nerve-pulps as a pianist
strikes the keys of his instrument. I am satisfied that there are as
great masters of this nerve-playing as Vieuxtemps or Thalberg in their
lines of performance. Married life is the school in which the most
accomplished artists in this department are found. A delicate woman is
the best instrument; she has such a magnificent compass of sensibilities!
From the deep inward moan which follows pressure on the great nerves of
right, to the sharp cry as the filaments of taste are struck with a
crashing sweep, is a range which no other instrument possesses. A few
exercises on it daily at home fit a man wonderfully for his habitual
labors, and refresh him immensely as he returns from them. No stranger
can get a great many notes of torture out of a human soul; it takes one
that knows it well,—parent, child, brother, sister, intimate. Be very
careful to whom you give a side-door key; too many have them already.
—You remember the old story of the tender-hearted man, who placed a
frozen viper in his bosom, and was stung by it when it became thawed? If
we take a cold-blooded creature into our bosom, better that it should
sting us and we should die than that its chill should slowly steal into
our hearts; warm it we never can! I have seen faces of women that were
fair to look upon, yet one could see that the icicles were forming round
these women’s hearts. I knew what freezing image lay on the white
breasts beneath the laces!
A very simple intellectual mechanism answers the necessities of
friendship, and even of the most intimate relations of life. If a watch
tells us the hour and the minute, we can be content to carry it about
with us for a life-time, though it has no second-hand and is not a
repeater, nor a musical watch,—though it is not enamelled nor
jewelled,—in short, though it has little beyond the wheels required for a
trustworthy instrument, added to a good face and a pair of useful hands.
The more wheels there are in a watch or a brain, the more trouble they
are to take care of. The movements of exaltation which belong to genius
are egotistic by their very nature. A calm, clear mind, not subject to
the spasms and crises which are so often met with in creative or
intensely perceptive natures, is the best basis for love or
friendship.—Observe, I am talking about minds. I won’t say, the more
intellect, the less capacity for loving; for that would do wrong to the
understanding and reason;—but, on the other hand, that the brain often
runs away with the heart’s best blood, which gives the world a few pages
of wisdom or sentiment or poetry, instead of making one other heart
happy, I have no question.
If one’s intimate in love or friendship cannot or does not share all
one’s intellectual tastes or pursuits, that is a small matter.
Intellectual companions can be found easily in men and books. After all,
if we think of it, most of the world’s loves and friendships have been
between people that could not read nor spell.
But to radiate the heat of the affections into a clod which absorbs all
that is poured into it, but never warms beneath the sunshine of smiles or
the pressure of hand or lip,—this is the great martyrdom of sensitive
beings,—most of all in that perpetual auto da fé where young womanhood
is the sacrifice.
—You noticed, perhaps, what I just said about the loves and friendships
of illiterate persons,—that is, of the human race, with a few exceptions
here and there. I like books,—I was born and bred among them, and have
the easy feeling, when I get into their presence, that a stable-boy has
among horses. I don’t think I undervalue them either as companions or as
instructors. But I can’t help remembering that the world’s great men
have not commonly been great scholars, nor its great scholars great men.
The Hebrew patriarchs had small libraries, I think, if any; yet they
represent to our imaginations a very complete idea of manhood, and, I
think, if we could ask in Abraham to dine with us men of letters next
Saturday, we should feel honored by his company.
What I wanted to say about books is this: that there are times in which
every active mind feels itself above any and all human books.
—I think a man must have a good opinion of himself, Sir,—said the
divinity-student,—who should feel himself above Shakspeare at any time.
My young friend,—I replied,—the man who is never conscious of a state of
feeling or of intellectual effort entirely beyond expression by any form
of words whatsoever is a mere creature of language. I can hardly believe
there are any such men. Why, think for a moment of the power of music.
The nerves that make us alive to it spread out (so the Professor tells
me) in the most sensitive region of the marrow just where it is widening
to run upwards into the hemispheres. It has its seat in the region of
sense rather than of thought. Yet it produces a continuous and, as it
were, logical sequence of emotional and intellectual changes; but how
different from trains of thought proper! how entirely beyond the reach of
symbols!—Think of human passions as compared with all phrases! Did you
ever hear of a man’s growing lean by the reading of “Romeo and Juliet,”
or blowing his brains out because Desdemona was maligned? There are a
good many symbols, even, that are more expressive than words. I remember
a young wife who had to part with her husband for a time. She did not
write a mournful poem; indeed, she was a silent person, and perhaps
hardly said a word about it; but she quietly turned of a deep orange
color with jaundice. A great many people in this world have but one form
of rhetoric for their profoundest experiences,—namely, to waste away and
die. When a man can read, his paroxysm of feeling is passing. When he
can read, his thought has slackened its hold.—You talk about reading
Shakspeare, using him as an expression for the highest intellect, and you
wonder that any common person should be so presumptuous as to suppose his
thought can rise above the text which lies before him. But think a
moment. A child’s reading of Shakspeare is one thing, and Coleridge’s or
Schlegel’s reading of him is another. The saturation-point of each mind
differs from that of every other. But I think it is as true for the
small mind which can only take up a little as for the great one which
takes up much, that the suggested trains of thought and feeling ought
always to rise above—not the author, but the reader’s mental version of
the author, whoever he may be.
I think most readers of Shakspeare sometimes find themselves thrown into
exalted mental conditions like those produced by music. Then they may
drop the book, to pass at once into the region of thought without words.
We may happen to be very dull folks, you and I, and probably are, unless
there is some particular reason to suppose the contrary. But we get
glimpses now and then of a sphere of spiritual possibilities, where we,
dull as we are now, may sail in vast circles round the largest compass of
earthly intelligences.
—I confess there are times when I feel like the frien
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