Yet I should love to have a little box by the seashore.  I should love to gaze out on the wild feline element from a front window of my own, just as I should love to look on a caged panther, and see it, stretch its shining length, and then curl over and lap its smooth sides, and by-and-by begin to lash itself into rage and show its white teeth and spring at its bars, and howl the cry of its mad, but, to me, harmless fury.—­And then,—­to look at it with that inward eye,—­who does not love to shuffle off time and its concerns, at intervals,—­to forget who is President and who is Governor, what race he belongs to, what language he speaks, which golden-headed nail of the firmament his particular planetary system is hung upon, and listen to the great liquid metronome as it beats its solemn measure, steadily swinging when the solo or duet of human life began, and to swing just as steadily after the human chorus has died out and man is a fossil on its shores?

—­What should decide one, in choosing a summer residence?  —­Constitution, first of all.  How much snow could you melt in an hour, if you were planted in a hogshead of it?  Comfort is essential to enjoyment.  All sensitive people should remember that persons in easy circumstances suffer much more cold in summer—­that is, the warm half of the year—­than in winter, or the other half.  You must cut your climate to your constitution, as much as your clothing to your shape.  After this, consult your taste and convenient.  But if you would be happy in Berkshire, you must carry mountains in your brain; and if you would enjoy Nahant, you must have an ocean in your soul.  Nature plays at dominos with you; you must match her piece, or she will never give it up to you.

—­The schoolmistress said, in a rather mischievous way, that she was afraid some minds or souls would be a little crowded, if they took in the Rocky Mountains or the Atlantic.

Have you ever read the little book called “The Stars and the Earth?”—­said I.—­Have you seen the Declaration of Independence photographed in a surface that a fly’s foot would cover?  The forms or conditions of Time and Space, as Kant will tell you, are nothing in themselves,—­only our way of looking at things.  You are right, I think, however, in recognizing the category of Space as being quite as applicable to minds as to the outer world.  Every man of reflection is vaguely conscious of an imperfectly-defined circle which is drawn about his intellect.  He has a perfectly clear sense that the fragments of his intellectual circle include the curves of many other minds of which he is cognizant.  He often recognizes these as manifestly concentric with his own, but of less radius.  On the other hand, when we find a portion of an are on the outside of our own, we say it intersects ours, but are very slow to confess or to see that it circumscribes it.  Every now and then a man’s mind is stretched by a new idea or sensation, and never shrinks back to its former dimensions.  After looking at the Alps, I felt that my mind had been stretched beyond the limits of its elasticity, and fitted so loosely on my old ideas of space that I had to spread these to fit it.