slug-like creatures, larvae, perhaps, more horrible in their pulpy stillness than even in the infernal wriggle of maturity!  But no sooner is the stone turned and the wholesome light of day let upon this compressed and blinded community of creeping things, than all of them that enjoy the luxury of legs—­and some of them have a good many—­rush round wildly, butting each other and everything in their way, and end in a general stampede for underground retreats from the region poisoned by sunshine. Next year you will find the grass growing tall and green where the stone lay; the ground-bird builds her nest where the beetle had his hole; the dandelion and the buttercup are growing there, and the broad fans of insect-angels open and shut over their golden disks, as the rhythmic waves of blissful consciousness pulsate through their glorified being.

——­The young fellow whom they call John saw fit to say, in his very familiar way,—­at which I do not choose to take offence, but which I sometimes think it necessary to repress,—­that I was coming it rather strong on the butterflies.

No, I replied; there is meaning in each of those images,—­the butterfly as well as the others.  The stone is ancient error.  The grass is human nature borne down and bleached of all its color by it.  The shapes that are found beneath are the crafty beings that thrive in darkness, and the weaker organisms kept helpless by it.  He who turns the stone over is whosoever puts the staff of truth to the old lying incubus, no matter whether he do it with a serious face or a laughing one.  The next year stands for the coming time.  Then shall the nature which had lain blanched and broken rise in its full stature and native hues in the sunshine.  Then shall God’s minstrels build their nests in the hearts of a new-born humanity.  Then shall beauty—­Divinity taking outlines and color—­light upon the souls of men as the butterfly, image of the beatified spirit rising from the dust, soars from the shell that held a poor grub, which would never have found wings, had not the stone been lifted.

You never need think you can turn over any old falsehood without a terrible squirming and scattering of the horrid little population that dwells under it.

——­Every real thought on every real subject knocks the wind out of somebody or other.  As soon as his breath comes back, he very probably begins to expend it in hard words.  These are the best evidence a man can have that he has said something it was time to say.  Dr. Johnson was disappointed in the effect of one of his pamphlets.  “I think I have not been attacked enough for it,” he said;—­“attack is the reaction; I never think I have hit hard unless it rebounds.”

——­If a fellow attacked my opinions in print, would I reply?  Not I. Do you think I don’t understand what my friend, the Professor, long ago called the hydrostatic paradox of controversy?

Don’t know what that means?—­Well, I will tell you.  You know, that, if you had a bent tube, one arm of which was of the size of a pipe-stem, and the other big enough to hold the ocean, water would stand at the same height in one as in the other.  Controversy equalizes fools and wise men in the same way,—­and the fools know it.