nd are the victims of these
details; and once in a fortnight we arrive perhaps at a rational moment.
If we were not thus infatuated, if we saw the real from hour to hour, we
should not be here to write and to read, but should have been burned
or frozen long ago. She would never get anything done, if she suffered
admirable Crichtons and universal geniuses. She loves better a
wheelwright who dreams all night of wheels, and a groom who is part
of his horse; for she is full of work, and these are her hands. As the
frugal farmer takes care that his cattle shall eat down the rowen,
and swine shall eat the waste of his house, and poultry shall pick the
crumbs,--so our economical mother dispatches a new genius and habit
of mind into every district and condition of existence, plants an eye
wherever a new ray of light can fall, and gathering up into some man
every property in the universe, establishes thousandfold occult mutual
attractions among her offspring, that all this wash and waste of power
may be imparted and exchanged.

Great dangers undoubtedly accrue from this incarnation and distribution
of the godhead, and hence Nature has her maligners, as if she were
Circe; and Alphonso of Castille fancied he could have given useful
advice. But she does not go unprovided; she has hellebore at the bottom
of the cup. Solitude would ripen a plentiful crop of despots. The
recluse thinks of men as having his manner, or as not having his manner;
and as having degrees of it, more and less. But when he comes into a
public assembly he sees that men have very different manners from his
own, and in their way admirable. In his childhood and youth he has
had many checks and censures, and thinks modestly enough of his
own endowment. When afterwards he comes to unfold it in propitious
circumstance, it seems the only talent; he is delighted with his
success, and accounts himself already the fellow of the great. But he
goes into a mob, into a banking house, into a mechanic's shop, into a
mill, into a laboratory, into a ship, into a camp, and in each new place
he is no better than an idiot; other talents take place, and rule the
hour. The rotation which whirls every leaf and pebble to the meridian,
reaches to every gift of man, and we all take turns at the top.

For Nature, who abhors mannerism, has set her heart on breaking up all
styles and tricks, and it is so much easier to do what one has done
before than to do a new thing, that there is a per