had taken no manner of thought of him till she saw him swept out into the street, the pitiful leavings of last night’s debauch, with cigar-ends, lemon-parings, tobacco-quids, slops, vile stenches, and the whole loathsome next-morning of the bar-room,—­an own child of the Almighty God!  I remember him as he was brought to be christened, a ruddy, rugged babe; and now there he wallows, reeking, seething,—­the dead corpse, not of a man, but of a soul,—­a putrefying lump, horrible for the life that is in it.  Comes the wind of heaven, that good Samaritan, and parts the hair upon his forehead, nor is too nice to kiss those parched, cracked lips; the morning opens upon him her eyes full of pitying sunshine, the sky yearns down to him,—­and there he lies fermenting.  O sleep! let me not profane thy holy name by calling that stertorous unconsciousness a slumber!  By and by comes along the State, God’s vicar.  Does she say, ’My poor, forlorn foster-child!  Behold here a force which I will make dig and plant and build for me’?  Not so, but, ’Here is a recruit ready-made to my hand, a piece of destroying energy lying unprofitably idle.’  So she claps an ugly gray suit on him, puts a musket in his grasp, and sends him off, with Gubernatorial and other godspeeds, to do duty as a destroyer.

I made one of the crowd at the last Mechanics’ Fair, and, with the rest, stood gazing in wonder at a perfect machine, with its soul of fire, its boiler-heart that sent the hot blood pulsing along the iron arteries, and its thews of steel.  And while I was admiring the adaptation of means to end, the harmonious involutions of contrivance, and the never-bewildered complexity, I saw a grimed and greasy fellow, the imperious engine’s lackey and drudge, whose sole office was to let fall, at intervals, a drop or two of oil upon a certain joint.  Then my soul said within me, See there a piece of mechanism to which that other you marvel at is but as the rude first effort of a child,—­a force which not merely suffices to set a few wheels in motion, but which can send an impulse all through the infinite future,—­a contrivance, not for turning out pins, or stitching button-holes, but for making Hamlets and Lears.  And yet this thing of iron shall be housed, waited on, guarded from rust and dust, and it shall be a crime but so much as to scratch it with a pin; while the other, with its fire of God in it, shall be buffeted hither and thither, and finally sent carefully a thousand miles to be the target for a Mexican cannon-ball.  Unthrifty Mother State!  My heart burned within me for pity and indignation, and I renewed this covenant with my own soul,—­In aliis mansuetus ero, at, in blasphemiis contra Christum, non ita..—­H.W.]