ons and desires, and convert it
into one tame, uniform, _mediocre good_, which would be _good_ but to
themselves alone, and ultimately not even that."

"I think I can now understand you," I said; "you describe a sort of
swinish wisdom that would convert the world into one vast sty. For my
own part, I have travelled far enough to know the value of a blue hill,
and would not willingly lose so much as one of these landmarks of our
mother land, by which kindly hearts in distant countries love to
remember it."

"I daresay we are getting fanciful," rejoined my companion; "but
certainly, in man's schemes of improvement, both physical and moral,
there is commonly a littleness and want of adaptation to the general
good that almost always defeats his aims. He sees and understands but a
minute portion--it is always some partial good he would introduce; and
thus he but destroys the just proportions of a nicely-regulated system
of things by exaggerating one of the parts. I passed of late through
a richly-cultivated district of country, in which the agricultural
improver had done his utmost. Never were there finer fields, more
convenient steadings, crops of richer promise, a better regulated system
of production. Corn and cattle had mightily improved; but what had man,
the lord of the soil, become? Is not the body better than food, and life
than raiment? If that decline for which all other things exist, it
surely matters little that all these other things prosper. And here,
though the corn, the cattle, the fields, the steadings had improved, man
had sunk. There were but two classes in the district: a few cold-hearted
speculators, who united what is worst in the character of the landed
proprietor and the merchant--these were your gentleman farmers; and
a class of degraded helots, little superior to the cattle they
tended--these were your farm servants. And for two such extreme
classes--necessary result of such a state of things--had this
unfortunate, though highly-eulogized district, parted with a moral,
intelligent, high-minded peasantry--the true boast and true riches of
their country."

"I have, I think, observed something like what you describe," I said.

"I give," he replied, "but one instance of a thousand. But mark how the
sun's lower disk has just reached the line of the horizon, and how the
long level rule of light stretches to the very innermost recess of the
cave! It darkens as the orb sinks. And see how the gauze-like