ages, the planet we live on may seem to
us no bigger than our neighbor Venus appeared when she passed before the
sun a few months ago, looking as if we could take her between our thumb
and finger, like a bullet or a marble? And time, too; how long was it
from the serious sunrise to the joyous "sun-down" of an old-fashioned,
puritanical, judaical first day of the week, which a pious fraud
christened "the Sabbath"? Was it a fortnight, as we now reckon duration,
or only a week? Curious entities, or non-entities, space and tithe?
When you see a metaphysician trying to wash his hands of them and get rid
of these accidents, so as to lay his dry, clean palm on the absolute,
does it not remind you of the hopeless task of changing the color of the
blackamoor by a similar proceeding? For space is the fluid in which he
is washing, and time is the soap which he is using up in the process, and
he cannot get free from them until he can wash himself in a mental
vacuum.

In my reference to the old house in a former paper, published years ago,
I said,

"By and by the stony foot of the great University will plant itself on
this whole territory, and the private recollections which clung so
tenaciously to the place and its habitations will have died with those
who cherished them."

What strides the great University has taken since those words were
written! During all my early years our old Harvard Alma Mater sat still
and lifeless as the colossi in the Egyptian desert. Then all at once,
like the statue in Don Giovanni, she moved from her pedestal. The fall
of that "stony foot" has effected a miracle like the harp that Orpheus
played, like the teeth which Cadmus sowed. The plain where the moose and
the bear were wandering while Shakespeare was writing Hamlet, where a few
plain dormitories and other needed buildings were scattered about in my
school-boy days, groans under the weight of the massive edifices which
have sprung up all around them, crowned by the tower of that noble
structure which stands in full view before me as I lift my eyes from the
portfolio on the back of which I am now writing.

For I must be permitted to remind you that I have not yet opened it. I
have told you that I have just finished a long memoir, and that it has
cost me no little labor to overcome some of its difficulties,--if I have
overcome them, which others must decide. And I feel exactly as honest
Dobbin feels when his harness is slipped off after a long jo