well betake ourselves to
very solemn reflection as to whether we are, at the present moment, in
our wits and senses, or not.

The peculiar proficiencies of great epochs are as astonishing as the
exploits of individual frenzy. The era of the Greek rhapsodists, when a
body of matchless epical literature was handed down by memory from
generation to generation, and a recitation of the whole "Odyssey" was
not too much for a dinner-party,--the era of Periclean culture, when the
Athenian populace was wont to pass whole days in the theatre, attending
with unfaltering intellectual keenness and aesthetic delight to three or
four long dramas, either of which would exhaust a modern audience,--the
wild and vast systems of imaginary abstractions, which the
Neo-Platonists, as also the German transcendentalists, so strangely
devised and became enamored of,--the grotesque views of men and things,
the funny universe altogether, which made up both the popular and the
learned thought of the Middle Ages,--the Buddhistic Orient, with its
subtile metaphysical illusions, its unreal astronomical heavens, its
habits of repose and its tornadoes of passion,--such are instances of
great diversities of character, which would be hardly accountable to
each other on the supposition of mutual sanity. They suggest a
difference of ideas, moods, habits, and capacities, which in
contemporaries and associates would amply justify either party that
happened to be the majority in turning all the rest into insane asylums.
It is the demoniac element, the raving of some particular demon, that
creates greatness either in men or nations. Power is maniacal. A
mysterious fury, a heavenly inspiration, an incomprehensible and
irresistible impulse, goads humanity on to achievements. Every age,
every person, and every art obeys the wand of the enchanter. History
moves by indirections. The first historic tendency is likely to be
slightly askew; there follows then an historic triumph, then an historic
eccentricity, then an historic folly, then an explosion; and then the
series begins again. In the grade of folly, hard upon an explosion, lies
modern literature.

The characteristic mania of the last two centuries is reading and
writing. Solomon discovered that much study is a weariness of the flesh;
Aristophanes complained of the multitude and indignity of authors in his
time; and the famed preacher, Geyler von Kaisersberg, in the age of
prevalent monkery and Benedictine pl