hours;
morning and night, solstice and equinox, geometry, astronomy and all
the lovely accidents of nature play through his mind. Money, which
represents the prose of life, and which is hardly spoken of in parlors
without an apology, is, in its effects and laws, as beautiful as roses.
Property keeps the accounts of the world, and is always moral. The
property will be found where the labor, the wisdom, and the virtue have
been in nations, in classes, and (the whole life-time considered, with
the compensations) in the individual also. How wise the world appears,
when the laws and usages of nations are largely detailed, and the
completeness of the municipal system is considered! Nothing is left
out. If you go into the markets and the custom-houses, the insurers' and
notaries' offices, the offices of sealers of weights and measures, of
inspection of provisions,--it will appear as if one man had made it
all. Wherever you go, a wit like your own has been before you, and
has realized its thought. The Eleusinian mysteries, the Egyptian
architecture, the Indian astronomy, the Greek sculpture, show that there
always were seeing and knowing men in the planet. The world is full of
masonic ties, of guilds, of secret and public legions of honor; that
of scholars, for example; and that of gentlemen, fraternizing with the
upper class of every country and every culture.

I am very much struck in literature by the appearance that one person
wrote all the books; as if the editor of a journal planted his body of
reporters in different parts of the field of action, and relieved some
by others from time to time; but there is such equality and identity
both of judgment and point of view in the narrative that it is plainly
the work of one all-seeing, all-hearing gentleman. I looked into Pope's
Odyssey yesterday: it is as correct and elegant after our canon of
to-day as if it were newly written. The modernness of all good books
seems to give me an existence as wide as man. What is well done I feel
as if I did; what is ill done I reck not of. Shakspeare's passages of
passion (for example, in Lear and Hamlet) are in the very dialect of the
present year. I am faithful again to the whole over the members in my
use of books. I find the most pleasure in reading a book in a manner
least flattering to the author. I read Proclus, and sometimes Plato, as
I might read a dictionary, for a mechanical help to the fancy and the
imagination. I read for the lu