’Think of it:  for three dollars a year I buy a season-ticket to this great Globe Theatre, for which God would write the dramas (only that we like farces, spectacles, and the tragedies of Apollyon better), whose scene-shifter is Time, and whose curtain is rung down by Death.

’Such thoughts will occur to me sometimes as I am tearing off the wrapper of my newspaper.  Then suddenly that otherwise too often vacant sheet becomes invested for me with a strange kind of awe.  Look! deaths and marriages, notices of inventions, discoveries, and books, lists of promotions, of killed, wounded, and missing, news of fires, accidents, of sudden wealth and as sudden poverty;—­I hold in my hand the ends of myriad invisible electric conductors, along which tremble the joys, sorrows, wrongs, triumphs, hopes, and despairs of as many men and women everywhere.  So that upon that mood of mind which seems to isolate me from mankind as a spectator of their puppet-pranks, another supervenes, in which I feel that I, too, unknown and unheard of, am yet of some import to my fellows.  For, through my newspaper here, do not families take pains to send me, an entire stranger, news of a death among them?  Are not here two who would have me know of their marriage?  And, strangest of all, is not this singular person anxious to have me informed that he has received a fresh supply of Dimitry Bruisgins?  But to none of us does the Present continue miraculous (even if for a moment discerned as such).  We glance carelessly at the sunrise, and get used to Orion and the Pleiades.  The wonder wears off, and to-morrow this sheet, (Acts x. 11, 12) in which a vision was let down to me from Heaven, shall be the wrappage to a bar of soap or the platter for a beggar’s broken victuals.’—­H.W.]

No.  VII

A LETTER

FROM A CANDIDATE FOR THE PRESIDENCY IN ANSWER TO SUTTIN QUESTIONS PROPOSED BY MR. HOSEA BIGLOW, INCLOSED IN A NOTE FROM MR. BIGLOW TO S.H.  GAY, ESQ., EDITOR OF THE NATIONAL ANTI-SLAVERY STANDARD

[Curiosity may be said to be the quality which preeminently distinguishes and segregates man from the lower animals.  As we trace the scale of animated nature downward, we find this faculty (as it may truly he called) of the mind diminished in the savage, and wellnigh extinct in the brute.  The first object which civilized man proposes to himself I take to be the finding out whatsoever he can concerning his neighbors. Nihil humanum a me alienum puto; I am curious about even John Smith.  The desire next in strength to this (an opposite pole, indeed, of the same magnet) is that of communicating the unintelligence we have carefully picked up.