in memory what, indeed, one is seldom permitted to forget:  that they were addressed to the ear; and in imagination one must hold some shadowy simulacrum of the orator himself, uttering his work.  These conditions being fulfilled there remains for application to the matter of the discourse too little attention to get much good of it, and the total effect is confusion.  Literature by which the reader is compelled to bear in mind the producer and the circumstances under which it was produced can be spared.

NATURA BENIGNA

It is not always on remote islands peopled with pagans that great disasters occur, as memory witnesseth.  Nor are the forces of nature inadequate to production of a fiercer throe than any that we have known.  The situation is this:  we are tied by the feet to a fragile shell imperfectly confining a force powerful enough under favoring conditions, to burst it asunder and set the fragments wallowing and grinding together in liquid flame, in the blind fury of a readjustment.  Nay, it needs no such stupendous cataclysm to depeople this uneasy orb.  Let but a square mile be blown out of the bottom of the sea, or a great rift open there.  Is it to be supposed that we would be unaffected in the altered conditions generated by a contest between the ocean and the earth’s molten core?  These fatalities are not only possible but in the highest degree probable.  It is probable, indeed, that they have occurred over and over again, effacing all the more highly organized forms of life, and compelling the slow march of evolution to begin anew.  Slow?  On the stage of Eternity the passing of races—­the entrances and exits of Life—­are incidents in a brisk and lively drama, following one another with confusing rapidity.

Mankind has not found it practicable to abandon and avoid those places where the forces of nature have been most malign.  The track, of the Western tornado is speedily repeopled.  San Francisco is still populous, despite its earthquake, Galveston despite its storm, and even the courts of Lisbon are not kept by the lion and the lizard.  In the Peruvian village straight downward into whose streets the crew of a United States warship once looked from the crest of a wave that stranded her a half mile inland are heard the tinkle of the guitar and the voices of children at play.  There are people living at Herculaneum and Pompeii.  On the slopes about Catania the goatherd endures with what courage he may the trembling of the ground beneath his feet as old Enceladus again turns over on his other side.  As the Hoang-Ho goes back inside its banks after fertilizing its contiguity with hydrate of China-man the living agriculturist follows the receding wave, sets up his habitation beneath the broken embankment, and again the Valley of the Gone Away blossoms as the rose, its people diving with Death.