motive and force in the pyramid-builders of the
earliest recorded antiquity, in the evolution of Greek architecture, and
in the sudden springing up of those wondrous cathedrals of the twelfth
and following centuries, growing out of the soil with stem and bud and
blossom, like flowers of stone whose seeds might well have been the
flaming aerolites cast over the battlements of heaven. You may see the
same law showing itself in the brief periods of glory which make the
names of Pericles and Augustus illustrious with reflected splendors; in
the painters, the sculptors, the scholars of "Leo's golden days"; in the
authors of the Elizabethan time; in the poets of the first part of this
century following that dreary period, suffering alike from the silence of
Cowper and the song of Hayley. You may accept the fact as natural, that
Zwingli and Luther, without knowing each other, preached the same
reformed gospel; that Newton, and Hooke, and Halley, and Wren arrived
independently of each other at the great law of the diminution of gravity
with the square of the distance; that Leverrier and Adams felt their
hands meeting, as it were, as they stretched them into the outer darkness
beyond the orbit of Uranus, in search of the dim, unseen Planet; that
Fulton and Bell, that Wheatstone and Morse, that Daguerre and Niepce,
were moving almost simultaneously in parallel paths to the same end. You
see why Patrick Henry, in Richmond, and Samuel Adams, in Boston, were
startling the crown officials with the same accents of liberty, and why
the Mecklenburg Resolutions had the very ring of the Protest of the
Province of Massachusetts. This law of simultaneous intellectual
movement, recognized by all thinkers, expatiated upon by Lord Macaulay
and by Mr. Herbert Spencer among recent writers, is eminently applicable
to that change of thought and feeling which necessarily led to the
present conflict.

The antagonism of the two sections of the Union was not the work of this
or that enthusiast or fanatic. It was the consequence of a movement in
mass of two different forms of civilization in different directions, and
the men to whom it was attributed were only those who represented it most
completely, or who talked longest and loudest about it. Long before the
accents of those famous statesmen referred to ever resounded in the halls
of the Capitol, long before the "Liberator" opened its batteries, the
controversy now working itself out by trial o