With the unpublished desire to be envied, whereto here and there amongst us is sacrificed the sky, abides the desire for an object of unconfessed contempt.  Both are contrary to that more authentic, that essential solitariness wherein a few men have the grace to live, and wherein all men are compelled to die.  Both are unpublished even now, even in our days, when it costs men so little to manifest the effrontery of their opinions.

The difference between our worldliness and the New-worldliness is chiefly that here we are apt to remove, by a little space, the distinction brought about by riches, to put it back, to interpose, between it and our actual life, a generation or two, an education or two.  Obviously, it was riches that made the class differences, if not now, then a little time ago.  Therefore the New England citizen should not be reproved by us for anything except his too great candour.  A social guide-book to some city of the Republic is in my hands.  I note how the very names of streets take a sound of veneration or of cheerful derision from the writer’s pen.  It is evident that the names are almost enough.  They have an expression.  He is like a naif teller of humorous anecdotes, who cannot keep his own smiles in order till he have done.

This social writer has scorn, as an author should, and he wreaks it upon parishes.  He turns me a phrase with the northern end of a town and makes an epigram of the southern.  He caps a sarcasm with an address.

In truth, we too might write social guide-books to the same effect, had we the same simplicity.  It is to be thought that we too hold an address, be it a good one, so closely that if Fortune should see fit to snatch it from us, she must needs do so with violence.  Such unseemly violence, in this as in other transactions, is ours in the clinging and not hers in the taking.  For equal is the force of Fortune, and steady is her grasp, whether she despoil the great of their noble things or strip the mean of things ignoble, whether she take from the clutching or the yielding hand.

Strange are the little traps laid by the Londoner so as to capture an address by the hem if he may.  You would think a good address to be of all blessings the most stationary, and one to be either gained or missed, and no two ways about it.  But not so.  You shall see it waylaid at the angles of squares, with no slight exercise of skill, delayed, entreated, detained, entangled, intricately caught, persuaded to round a corner, prolonged beyond all probability, pursued.

One address there will in the future be for us, and few will visit there.  It will bear the number of a narrow house.  May it avow its poverty and be poor; for the obscure inhabitant, in frigid humility, shall have no thought nor no eye askance upon the multitude.

THE AUDIENCE