But, after all, here is a great fact between us.  We belong to two different civilizations, and, until we recognize what separates us, we are talking like Pyramus and Thisbe,—­without any hole in the wall to talk through.  Therefore, on the whole, if he were a superior fellow, incapable of mistaking it for personal conceit, I think I would let out the fact of the real American feeling about Old-World folks.  They are children to us in certain points of view.  They are playing with toys we have done with for whole generations.  That silly little drum they are always beating on, and the trumpet and the feather they make so much noise and cut such a figure with, we have not quite outgrown, but play with much less seriously and constantly than they do.  Then there is a whole museum of wigs, and masks, and lace-coats, and gold-sticks, and grimaces, and phrases, which we laugh at, honestly, without affectation, that are still used in the Old-World puppet-shows.  I don’t think we on our part ever understand the Englishman’s concentrated loyalty and specialized reverence.  But then we do think more of a man, as such, (barring some little difficulties about race and complexion which the Englishman will touch us on presently,) than any people that ever lived did think of him.  Our reverence is a great deal wider, if it is less intense.  We have caste among us, to some extent, it is true; but there is never a collar on the American wolf-dog such as you often see on the English mastiff, notwithstanding his robust, hearty individuality.

This confronting of two civilizations is always a grand sensation to me; it is like cutting through the isthmus and letting the two oceans swim into each other’s laps.  The trouble is, it is so difficult to let out the whole American nature without its self-assertion seeming to take a personal character.  But I never enjoy the Englishman so much as when he talks of church and king like Manco Capac among the Peruvians.  Then you get the real British flavor, which the cosmopolite Englishman loses.  The best conversation I have had with one of them for a long time, lively, fluent, courteous, delightful, was a variation and illustrative development in elegant phrases of the following short sentences.

Englishman.—­Sir, your New-World civilization is barbarism.

American.—­Sir, your Old-World development is infancy.

How much better this thorough interpenetration of ideas than a barren interchange of courtesies, or a bush-fighting argument, in which each man tries to cover as much of himself and expose as much of his opponent as the tangled thicket of the disputed ground will let him!

——­My thoughts flow in layers or strata, at least three deep.  I follow a slow person’s talk, and keep a perfectly clear under-current of my own beneath it.  My friend the Autocrat has already made a similar remark.  Under both runs obscurely a consciousness belonging to a third train of reflections, independent of the two others.  I will try to write out a mental movement in three parts.