auses of the essay's decay. The essayist tries to make a mechanical
conscience perform the duty of that fine spiritual freedom in which the
essay once had its highest effect with the reader, and in his dull
loyalty to the stated thesis he is superficial as well as tiresome.

The true subject is not one subject only, but many. It is like that
pungent bulb whose odorous energy increases with exfoliation, and
remains a potent fragrance in the air after the bulb has substantially
ceased to be under the fingers. The error of the modern essayist is to
suppose that he can ever have a single subject in hand; he has a score,
he has a hundred, as his elders and betters all know; and what he
mistakes for his destitution is really his superfluity. If he will be
honest (as he may with difficulty be), must not he recognize that what
seems a search for one theme is a hesitation between many pressing
forward for his choice? If he will make this admission we believe he
will be nearer the fact, and he will be a much more respectable figure
than he could feel himself in blindly fumbling about for a single
thesis. Life is never, and in nothing, the famine, perhaps, that we
imagine it. Much more probably it is a surfeit, and what we suppose are
the pangs of hunger are really the miseries of repletion. More people
are suffering from too much than from too little. Especially are the
good things here in a demoralizing profusion. Ask any large employer of
labor, and he will tell you that what ails the working-classes is an
excess of pianos and buggies and opera-boxes. Ask any workman what ails
his employer, and he will say that it is the ownership of the earth,
with a mortgage on planetary space. Both are probably right, or at least
one is as right as the other.

When we have with difficulty made our selection from the divine
redundancy of the ideal world, and so far as we could have reduced
ourselves to the penury of a sole possession, why do not we turn our
eyes to the example of Nature in not only bringing forth a hundred or a
thousand fold of the kind of seed planted, but in accompanying its
growth with that of an endless variety of other plants, all coming to
bear in a like profusion? Observe that wise husbandwoman (this is not
the contradiction in terms it seems), how when her business is
apparently a hay harvest, she mingles myriads of daisies and milkweed
and wild carrot and redtop with the grass, and lets her fancy riot all
round the