u may see what
_its_ "universal suffrage" is and has been, by looking into all
the ugly mud-ocean (with some old weathercocks atop) that now
_is:_ the world wholly (if we think of it) is the exact stamp of
men wholly, and of the _sincerest_ heart-tongue-and-hand
"suffrage" they could give about it, poor devils!--I was much
struck with Plato, last year, and his notions about Democracy:
mere Latter-Day Pamphlet _saxa et faces_ (read _faeces,_ if you
like) refined into empyrean radiance and lightning of the gods!--
I, for my own part, perceive the use of all this too, the
inevitability of all this; but perceive it (at the present
height it has attained) to be disastrous withal, to be horrible
and even damnable. That Judas Iscariot should come and slap
Jesus Christ on the shoulder in a familiar manner; that all
heavenliest nobleness should be flung out into the muddy streets
there to jostle elbows with all thickest-skinned denizens of
chaos, and get itself at every turn trampled into the gutters and
annihilated:--alas, the _reverse_ of all this was, is, and ever
will be, the strenuous effort and most solemn heart-purpose of
every good citizen in every country of the world,--and will
_reappear_ conspicuously as such (in New England and in Old,
first of all, as I calculate), when once this malodorous
melancholy "Uncle Tommery" is got all well put by! Which will
take some time yet, I think.--And so we will leave it.

I went to Germany last autumn; not _seeking_ anything very
definite; rather merely flying from certain troops of
carpenters, painters, bricklayers, &c., &c., who had made a
lodgment in this poor house; and have not even yet got their
incalculable riot quite concluded. Sorrow on them,--and no
return to these poor premises of mine till I have quite left!--In
Germany I found but little; and suffered, from six weeks of
sleeplessness in German beds, &c., &c., a great deal. Indeed I
seem to myself never yet to have quite recovered. The Rhine
which I honestly ascended from Rotterdam to Frankfort was, as I
now find, my chief Conquest the beautifulest river in the Earth,
I do believe; and my first idea of a World-river. It is many
fathoms deep, broader twice over than the Thames here at high
water; and rolls along, mirror-smooth (except that, in looking
close, you will find ten thousand little eddies in it),
voiceless, swift, with trim banks, through the heart of Europe,
and of the Middle Ages wedded to