et, but
which exude from and accompany him. Events expand with the character. As
once he found himself among toys, so now he plays a part in colossal
systems, and his growth is declared in his ambition, his companions, and
his performance. He looks like a piece of luck, but is a piece of
causation--the mosaic, angulated and ground to fit into the gap he fills.
Hence in each town there is some man who is, in his brain and performance,
an explanation of the tillage, production, factories, banks, churches,
ways of living, and society, of that town. If you do not chance to meet
him, all that you see will leave you a little puzzled: if you see him, it
will become plain. We know in Massachusetts who built New Bedford, who
built Lynn, Lowell, Lawrence, Clinton, Fitchburg, Holyoke, Portland, and
many another noisy mart. Each of these men, if they were transparent,
would seem to you not so much men, as walking cities, and, wherever you
put them, they would build one.

History is the action and reaction of these two,--Nature and Thought,--two
boys pushing each other on the curbstone of the pavement. Everything is
pusher or pushed: and matter and mind are in perpetual tilt and balance
so. Whilst the man is weak, the earth takes him up. He plants his brain
and affections. By-and-by he will take up the earth, and have his gardens
and vineyards in the beautiful order and productiveness of his thought.
Every solid in the universe is ready to become fluid on the approach of
the mind, and the power to flux it is the measure of the mind. If the wall
remain adamant, it accuses the want of thought. To a subtler force, it
will stream into new forms, expressive of the character of the mind.

What is the city in which we sit here, but an aggregate of incongruous
materials, which have obeyed the will of some man? The granite was
reluctant, but his hands were stronger, and it came. Iron was deep in the
ground, and well combined with stone, but could not hide from his fires.
Wood, lime, stuffs, fruits, gums, were dispersed over the earth and sea,
in vain. Here they are, within the reach of every man's day-labor--what he
wants of them.

The whole world is the flux of matter over the wires of thought to the
poles or points where it would build. The races of men rise out of the
ground preoccupied with a thought which rules them, and divided into
parties ready armed and angry to fight for this metaphysical abstraction.
The quality of the thought d