abundant food.  The man has never lived that can feed us ever.  The human mind cannot be enshrined in a person who shall set a barrier on any one side to this unbounded, unboundable empire.  It is one central fire, which, flaming now out of the lips of Etna, lightens the capes of Sicily, and now out of the throat of Vesuvius, illuminates the towers and vineyards of Naples.  It is one light which beams out of a thousand stars.  It is one soul which animates all men.

* * * * *

But I have dwelt perhaps tediously upon this abstraction of the Scholar.  I ought not to delay longer to add what I have to say of nearer reference to the time and to this country.

Historically, there is thought to be a difference in the ideas which predominate over successive epochs, and there are data for marking the genius of the Classic, of the Romantic, and now of the Reflective or Philosophical age.[76] With the views I have intimated of the oneness or the identity of the mind through all individuals, I do not much dwell on these differences.  In fact, I believe each individual passes through all three.  The boy is a Greek; the youth, romantic; the adult, reflective.  I deny not, however, that a revolution in the leading idea may be distinctly enough traced.

Our age is bewailed as the age of Introversion.[77] Must that needs be evil?  We, it seems, are critical.  We are embarrassed with second thoughts.[78] We cannot enjoy anything for hankering to know whereof the pleasure consists.  We are lined with eyes.  We see with our feet.  The time is infected with Hamlet’s unhappiness,—­

     “Sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought."[79]

Is it so bad then?  Sight is the last thing to be pitied.  Would we be blind?  Do we fear lest we should outsee nature and God, and drink truth dry?  I look upon the discontent of the literary class as a mere announcement of the fact that they find themselves not in the state of mind of their fathers, and regret the coming state as untried; as a boy dreads the water before he has learned that he can swim.  If there is any period one would desire to be born in, is it not the age of Revolution; when the old and the new stand side by side and admit of being compared; when the energies of all men are searched by fear and by hope; when the historic glories of the old can be compensated by the rich possibilities of the new era?  This time, like all times, is a very good one, if we but know what to do with it.

I read with some joy of the auspicious signs of the coming days, as they glimmer already through poetry and art, through philosophy and science, through church and state.