"--"Yes," answered he, "but not quite so
joyful perhaps!"--Well, well, I have heard from you again; and
you promise to be again constant in writing. Shall I believe
you, this time? Do it, and shame the Devil! I really am
persuaded it will do yourself good; and to me I know right well,
and have always known, what it will do. The gaunt lonesomeness
of this Midnight Hour, in the ugly universal _snoring_ hum of the
overfilled deep-sunk Posterity of Adam, renders an articulate
speaker precious indeed! Watchman, what sayest thou, then?
Watchman, what of the night?--
Your glimpses of the huge unmanageable Mississippi, of the huge
ditto Model Republic, have here and there something of the _epic_
in them,--_ganz nach meinem Sinne._ I see you do not dissent
from me in regard to that latter enormous Phenomenon, except on
the outer surface, and in the way of peaceably instead of
_un_peaceably accepting the same. Alas, all the world is a
"republic of the Mediocrities," and always was;--you may see what
_its_ "universal suffrage" is and has been, by looking into all
the ugly mud-ocean (with some old weathercocks atop) that now
_is:_ the world wholly (if we think of it) is the exact stamp of
men wholly, and of the _sincerest_ heart-tongue-and-hand
"suffrage" they could give about it, poor devils!--I was much
struck with Plato, last year, and his notions about Democracy:
mere Latter-Day Pamphlet _saxa et faces_ (read _faeces,_ if you
like) refined into empyrean radiance and lightning of the gods!--
I, for my own part, perceive the use of all this too, the
inevitability of all this; but perceive it (at the present
height it has attained) to be disastrous withal, to be horrible
and even damnable.
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