find ourselves freed from the outermost coil of
the accursed spiral; if all these things are true; if we may hope to make
them seem true, or even probable, to the doubting soul, in an hour's
discourse, then we may join without madness in the day's exultant
festivities; the bells may ring, the cannon may roar, the incense of our
harmless saltpetre fill the air, and the children who are to inherit the
fruit of these toiling, agonizing years, go about unblamed, making day
and night vocal with their jubilant patriotism.

The struggle in which we are engaged was inevitable; it might have come a
little sooner, or a little later, but it must have come. The disease of
the nation was organic, and not functional, and the rough chirurgery of
war was its only remedy.

In opposition to this view, there are many languid thinkers who lapse
into a forlorn belief that if this or that man had never lived, or if
this or that other man had not ceased to live, the country might have
gone on in peace and prosperity, until its felicity merged in the glories
of the millennium. If Mr. Calhoun had never proclaimed his heresies; if
Mr. Garrison had never published his paper; if Mr. Phillips, the
Cassandra in masculine shape of our long prosperous Ilium, had never
uttered his melodious prophecies; if the silver tones of Mr. Clay had
still sounded in the senate-chamber to smooth the billows of contention;
if the Olympian brow of Daniel Webster had been lifted from the dust to
fix its awful frown on the darkening scowl of rebellion,--we might have
been spared this dread season of convulsion. All this is but simple
Martha's faith, without the reason she could have given: "If Thou hadst
been here, my brother had not died."

They little know the tidal movements of national thought and feeling, who
believe that they depend for existence on a few swimmers who ride their
waves. It is not Leviathan that leads the ocean from continent to
continent, but the ocean which bears his mighty bulk as it wafts its own
bubbles. If this is true of all the narrower manifestations of human
progress, how much more must it be true of those broad movements in the
intellectual and spiritual domain which interest all mankind? But in the
more limited ranges referred to, no fact is more familiar than that there
is a simultaneous impulse acting on many individual minds at once, so
that genius comes in clusters, and shines rarely as a single star. You
may trace a common