hing a school-boy
can read Hamlet and can detect secrets of highest concernment yet
unpublished therein. I think I will never read any but the commonest
books,--the Bible, Homer, Dante, Shakspeare, and Milton. Then we are
impatient of so public a life and planet, and run hither and thither for
nooks and secrets. The imagination delights in the woodcraft of Indians,
trappers, and bee-hunters. We fancy that we are strangers, and not so
intimately domesticated in the planet as the wild man and the wild beast
and bird. But the exclusion reaches them also; reaches the climbing,
flying, gliding, feathered and four-footed man. Fox and woodchuck, hawk
and snipe and bittern, when nearly seen, have no more root in the deep
world than man, and are just such superficial tenants of the globe. Then
the new molecular philosophy shows astronomical interspaces betwixt atom
and atom, shows that the world is all outside; it has no inside.

The mid-world is best. Nature, as we know her, is no saint. The lights
of the church, the ascetics, Gentoos, and corn-eaters, she does not
distinguish by any favor. She comes eating and drinking and sinning. Her
darlings, the great, the strong, the beautiful, are not children of our
law; do not come out of the Sunday School, nor weigh their food, nor
punctually keep the commandments. If we will be strong with her strength
we must not harbor such disconsolate consciences, borrowed too from the
consciences of other nations. We must set up the strong present tense
against all the rumors of wrath, past or to come. So many things are
unsettled which it is of the first importance to settle;--and, pending
their settlement, we will do as we do. Whilst the debate goes forward on
the equity of commerce, and will not be closed for a century or two,
New and Old England may keep shop. Law of copyright and international
copyright is to be discussed, and in the interim we will sell our books
for the most we can. Expediency of literature, reason of literature,
lawfulness of writing down a thought, is questioned; much is to say on
both sides, and, while the fight waxes hot, thou, dearest scholar, stick
to thy foolish task, add a line every hour, and between whiles add
a line. Right to hold land, right of property, is disputed, and the
conventions convene, and before the vote is taken, dig away in your
garden, and spend your earnings as a waif or godsend to all serene and
beautiful purposes. Life itself is a bubble and a