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 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