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belli for a whole generation. Such fanciful speculations, it seeras to 

 me, are well calculated to import into the philosophy of human life, 

 and into the philosophy of human history, a theory of causation 

 which is as superficial as it is false. As honest Horatio says to 

 Hamlet in the play, when the latter proposes to trace the noble 

 dust of Alexander the Great, in imagination, until perchance 

 it may be found stopping a bung-hole, 1 feel like saying in the 

 presence of such fine-spun speculations, " 'Twere to consider 

 too curiously to consider so." The strong intellectual forces 

 which are organic in a great mind, as the strong moral and po- 

 litical forces which are organic in society, do not depend for their 

 evolution, or for their grand cyclical movements, on the casual 

 vicissitudes which ripple the surface of human life and afi"airs. 

 To argue in this wise is to mistake occasion for cause, and by con- 

 founding what is transient and incidental with what is permanent 

 and pervasive, is to make the noblest life, with its destined ends 

 and ways, the mere creature of accident, and is to convert human 

 history, with its great secular developments, into the fortuitous 

 rattle and chance combinations of the kaleidoscope. We may be 

 sure that Henry was too great a man to have lived and died with- 

 out making his mark on the age in which his lot was cast, what- 

 ever should have been the time, place, or circumstance which was 

 to disclose the color and complexion of his destiny. The strong, 

 clear mind, like the crystal, takes its shape and pressure from the 

 play of the constituent forces within it, and is not the sport of 

 casual influences that come from without. 



Armed, however, with his new enthusiasm, the nascent philo- 

 sopher hastened to join a night school in Albany, but soon ex- 

 hausted the lore of its master. Encountering next a peripatetic 

 teacher of English grammar, he became, under the pedagogue's 

 drill, so versed in the arts of orthography, etymology, syntax, and 

 prosody, that he started out himself on a grammatical tour through 

 the provincial districts of New York, and returning from this 

 first field of his triumphs as a teacher, he entered the Albany 

 Academy (then in charge of Dr. T. Romeyn Beck) as a pupil 

 in its more advanced studies. Meanwhile, in order to " pay his 

 way" in the academy, he sought employment as a teacher in a 

 neighboring district school, this being, as he afterwards was wont 

 to say, the only office he had ever sought in his life ; and in th's 

 office he succeeded so well that his salary was raised from $8 



