that we cannot strongly state one fact without seeming to
belie some other. I hold our actual knowledge very cheap.
Hear the rats in the wall, see the lizard on the fence, the
fungus under foot, the lichen on the log. What do I know
sympathetically, morally, of either of these worlds of life?
As old as the Caucasian man,--perhaps older,--these creatures
have kept their counsel beside him, and there is no record of
any word or sign that has passed from one to the other. What
connection do the books show between the fifty or sixty
chemical elements and the historical eras? Nay, what does
history yet record of the metaphysical annals of man? What
light does it shed on those mysteries which we hide under the
names Death and Immortality? Yet every history should be
written in a wisdom which divined the range of our affinities
and looked at facts as symbols. I am ashamed to see what a
shallow village tale our so-called History is. How many times
we must say Rome, and Paris, and Constantinople! What does
Rome know of rat and lizard? What are Olympiads and Consulates
to these neighboring systems of being? Nay, what food or
experience or succor have they for the Esquimaux seal-hunter,
for the Kanaka in his canoe, for the fisherman, the stevedore,
the porter?

Broader and deeper we must write our annals,--from an ethical
reformation, from an influx of the ever new, ever sanative
conscience,--if we would trulier express our central and wide-
related nature, instead of this old chronology of selfishness
and pride to which we have too long lent our eyes. Already that
day exists for us, shines in on us at unawares, but the path of
science and of letters is not the way into nature. The idiot,