Experience

are rich pasturage, and my neighbor has fertile meadow, but my field,” says the querulous farmer, “only holds the world together.” I quote another man’s saying; unluckily that other withdraws himself in the same way, and quotes me. ’Tis the trick of nature thus to degrade today; a good deal of buzz, and somewhere a result slipped magically in. Every roof is agreeable to the eye until it is lifted; then we find tragedy and moaning women and hard-eyed husbands and deluges of lethe, and the men ask, “What’s the news?” as if the old were so bad. How many individuals can we count in society? how many actions? how many opinions? So much of our time is preparation, so much is routine, and so much retrospect, that the pith of each man’s genius contracts itself to a very few hours. The history of literature⁠—take the net result of Tiraboschi, Warton, or Schlegel⁠—is a sum of very few ideas and of very few original tales; all the rest being variation of these. So in this great society wide lying around us, a critical analysis would find very few spontaneous actions. It is almost all custom and gross sense. There are even few opinions, and these seem organic in the speakers, and do not disturb the universal necessity.