16 EARLY SPRING IN MASSACHUSETTS. 
are events of importance whose interval is to ns 
a true historic period. 
The lecturer is wont to describe the nine¬ 
teenth century, the American of the last gen¬ 
eration, 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 perti¬ 
nent 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 ava¬ 
tars, in the interval between sleeping and wak¬ 
ing, aye, in one of the interstices of a Hin¬ 
doo 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 
