And to this description of loss men are nowadays peculiarly exposed.  The modern world is all battle-field; the smoke, the dust, the din fill every eye and ear; and the hill-top of Lucretius, where is it?  The indispensable, terrible newspaper, with its late allies, the Titans and sprites of steam and electricity,—­bringing to each retired nook, and thrusting in upon each otherwise peaceful household, the crimes, follies, fears, solicitudes, doubts, problems of all kingdoms and peoples,—­exasperates the former Scotch mist of impressions into a flooding rain, and almost threatens to swamp the brain of mankind.  The incitement to thought is ever greater; but the possibility of thinking, especially of thinking in a deep, simple, central way, is ever less.  Problems multiply, but how to attend to them is ever a still greater problem.  Guests of the intellect and imagination accumulate until the master of the house is pushed out of doors, and hospitality ceases from the mere excess of its occasion.  That must be a greater than Homer who should now do Homer’s work.  He, there in his sweet, deep-skied Ionia, privileged with an experience so simple and yet so salient and powerful, might well hope to act upon this victoriously by his spirit, might hope to transmute it, as indeed he did, into melodious and enduring human suggestion.  Would it have been all the same, had he lived in our type-setting modern world, with its multitudinous knowledges, its aroused conscience, its spurred and yet thwarted sympathies, its new incitements to egotism also, and new tools and appliances for egotism to use,—­placed, as it were, in the focus of a vast whispering-gallery, where all the sounds of heaven and earth came crowding, contending, incessant upon his ear?  One sees at a glance how the serious thought and poetry of Greece cling to a few master facts, not being compelled to fight always with the many-headed monster of detail; and this suggests to me that our literature may fall short of Grecian amplitude, depth, and simplicity, not wholly from inferiority of power, but from complications appertaining to our position.

The problem of our time is, How to digest and assimilate the Newspaper?  To complain of it, to desire its abolition, is an anachronism of the will:  it is to complain that time proceeds, and that events follow each other in due sequence.  It is hardly too bold to say that the newspaper is the modern world, as distinct from the antique and the mediaeval.  It represents, by its advent, that epoch in human history wherein each man must begin, in proportion to his capability of sympathy and consideration, to collate his private thoughts, fortunes, interests with those of the human race at large.  We are now in the crude openings of this epoch, fevered by its incidents and demands; and one of its tokens is a general exhaustion of the nervous system and failure of health, both here and in Europe,—­those of most sensitive spirit, and least retired and sheltered from the impressions of the time, suffering most.  All this will end, must end, victoriously.  In the mean time can we not somewhat adjust ourselves to this new condition?