14 EARLY SPRING IN MASSACHUSETTS. 
are listless. We may be diverted from an 
amusement, and amused by a diversion. It 
often happens that a diversion becomes our 
amusement, and an amusement our employ¬ 
ment. 
February 27, 1851. Of two men, one of 
whom knows nothing about a subject, and, what 
is extremely rare, knows that he knows noth¬ 
ing, and the other really knows something about 
it, but thinks that he knows all, what great ad¬ 
vantage has the latter over the former ? which 
is the better to deal with ? I do not know that 
knowledge amounts to anything more definite 
than a novel and grand surprise on a sudden 
revelation of the insufficiency of all we had 
called knowledge before, an indefinite sense of 
the grandeur and glory of the universe. It is a 
lighting up of the mist by the sun. But man 
cannot be said to know, in the highest sense, any 
better than he can look serenely and with im¬ 
punity in the face of the sun. 
How when a man purchases a thing, he is 
determined to get and get hold of it, using 
how many expletives and how long a string of 
synonymous or similar terms signifying posses¬ 
sion in the legal process. What’s mine’s my 
own. An old deed of a small piece of swamp 
land which I have lately surveyed at the risk of 
being mired past recovery, says that u the said 
