suspected what I was about. The lecture was as harmless as moonshine
to them. Whereas, if I had read to them the biography of the
greatest scamps in history, they might have thought that I had written
the lives of the deacons of their church. Ordinarily, the inquiry
is, Where did you come from? or, Where are you going? That was a
more pertinent question which I overheard one of my auditors put to
another one- "What does he lecture for?" It made me quake in my shoes.

  To speak impartially, the best men that I know are not serene, a
world in themselves. For the most part, they dwell in forms, and
flatter and study effect only more finely than the rest. We select
granite for the underpinning of our houses and barns; we build
fences of stone; but we do not ourselves rest on an underpinning of
granitic truth, the lowest primitive rock. Our sills are rotten.
What stuff is the man made of who is not coexistent in our thought
with the purest and subtilest truth? I often accuse my finest
acquaintances of an immense frivolity; for, while there are manners
and compliments we do not meet, we do not teach one another the
lessons of honesty and sincerity that the brutes do, or of
steadiness and solidity that the rocks do. The fault is commonly
mutual, however; for we do not habitually demand any more of each
other.

  That excitement about Kossuth, consider how characteristic, but
superficial, it was!- only another kind of politics or dancing. Men
were making speeches to him all over the country, but each expressed
only the thought, or the want of thought, of the multitude. No man
stood on truth. They were merely banded together, as usual one leaning
on another, and all together on nothing; as the Hindoos made the world
rest on an elephant, the elephant on a tortoise, and the tortoise on a
serpent, and had nothing to put under the serpent. For all fruit of
that stir we have the Kossuth hat.

  Just so hollow and ineffectual, for the most part, is our ordinary
conversation. Surface meets surface. When our life ceases to be inward
and private, conversation degenerates into mere gossip. We rarely meet
a man who can tell us any news which he has not read in a newspaper,
or been told by his neighbor; and, for the most part, the only
difference between us and our fellow is that he has seen the
newspaper, or been out to tea, and we have not. In proportion as our
inward life fails, we go more constantly and desperately to the
post-office. You may depend on it, that the poor fellow who walks away
with the greatest number of letters, proud of his extensive
correspondence, has not heard from himself this long while.

  I do not know but it is too much to read one newspaper a week. I
have tried it recently, and for so long it seems to me that I have not
dwelt in my native region. The sun, the clouds, the snow, the trees
say not so much to me. You cannot serve two masters. It requires
more than a day's devotion to know and to possess the wealth of a day.

  We may well be ashamed to tell what things we have read or heard
in our day. I did not know why my news should be so trivial-
considering what one's dreams and expectations are, why the
developments should be so paltry. The news we hear, for the most part,
is not news to our genius. It is the stalest repetition. You are often
tempted to ask why such stress is laid on a particular experience
which you have had- that, after twenty-five years, you should meet
Hobbins, Registrar of Deeds, again on the sidewalk. Have you not
budged an inch, then? Such is the daily news. Its facts appear to
float in the atmosphere, insignificant as the sporules of fungi, and
impinge on some neglected thallus, or surface of our minds, which
affords a basis for them, and hence a parasitic growth. We should wash
ourselves clean of such news. Of what consequence, though our planet
explode, if there is no character involved in the explosion? In health
we have not the least curiosity about such events. We do not live
for idle amusement. I would not run round a corner to see the world
blow up.

  All summer, and far into the autumn, perchance, you unconsciously
went by the newspapers and the news, and now you find it was because
the morning and the evening were full of news to you. Your walks
were full of incidents. You attended, not to the affairs of Europe,
but to your own affairs in Massachusetts fields. If you chance to live
and move and have your being in that thin stratum in which the
events that make the news transpire- thinner than the paper on which
it is printed- then these things will fill the world for you; but if
you soar above or dive below that plane, you cannot remember nor be
reminded of them. Really to see the sun rise or go down every day,
so to relate ourselves to a universal fact, would preserve us sane
forever. Nations! What are nations? Tartars, and Huns, and Chinamen!
Like insects, they swarm. The historian strives in vain to make them
memorable. It is for want of a man that there are so many men. It is
individuals that populate the world. Any man thinking may say with the
Spirit of Lodin-

        "I look down from my height on nations,

        And they become ashes before me;-

        Calm is my dwelling in the clouds;

        Pleasant are the great fields of my rest."

  Pray, let us live without being drawn by dogs, Esquimaux-fashion,
tearing over hill and dale, and biting each other's ears.

  Not without a slight shudder at the danger, I often perceive how
near I had come to admitting into my mind the details of some
trivial affair- the news of the street; and I am astonished to observe