appy Nations; I must call them Nations like to perish;
Nations that will either begin to recover, or else soon die. Recovery is
to be hoped;--yes, since there is in Nature an Almighty Beneficence, and
His voice, divinely terrible, can be heard in the world-whirlwind now,
even as from of old and forevermore. Recovery, or else destruction and
annihilation, is very certain; and the crisis, too, comes rapidly on:
but by Stump-Orator and Constitutional Palaver, however perfected, my
hopes of _recovery_ have long vanished. Not by them, I should imagine,
but by something far the reverse of them, shall we return to truth and
God!--

I tell you, the ignoble intellect cannot think the _truth_, even
within its own limits, and when it seriously tries! And of the ignoble
intellect that does not seriously try, and has even reached the
"ignobleness" of seriously trying the reverse, and of lying with its
very tongue, what are we to expect? It is frightful to consider. Sincere
wise speech is but an imperfect corollary, and insignificant outer
manifestation, of sincere wise thought. He whose very tongue utters
falsities, what has his heart long been doing? The thought of his heart
is not its wisest, not even _its_ wisest; it is its foolishest;--and
even of that we have a false and foolish copy. And it is Nature's Fact,
or the Thought of the Eternal, which we want to arrive at in regard
to the matter,--which if we do _not_ arrive at, we shall not save the
matter, we shall drive the matter into shipwreck!

The practice of modern Parliaments, with reporters sitting among them,
and twenty-seven millions mostly fools listening to them, fills me with
amazement. In regard to no _thing_, or fact as God and Nature have made
it, can you get so much as the real thought of any honorable head,--even
so far as _it_, the said honorable head, still has capacity of thought.
What the honorable gentleman's wisest thought is or would have been,
had he led from birth a life of piety and earnest veracity and heroic
virtue, you, and he himself poor deep-sunk creature, vainly conjecture
as from immense dim distances far in the rear of what he is led to
_say_. And again, far in the rear of what his thought is,--surely long
infinitudes beyond all _he_ could ever think,--lies the Thought of God
Almighty, the Image itself of the Fact, the thing you are in quest of,
and must find or do worse! Even his, the honorable gentleman's, actual
bewildered, falsified, vague