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 unpeaceably 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.  That Judas Iscariot should come and slap Jesus Christ on the shoulder in a familiar manner; that all heavenliest nobleness should be flung out into the muddy streets there to jostle elbows with all thickest-skinned denizens of chaos, and get itself at every turn trampled into the gutters and annihilated:—­alas, the reverse of all this was, is, and ever will be, the strenuous effort and most solemn heart-purpose of every good citizen in every country of the world,—­and will reappear conspicuously as such (in New England and in Old, first of all, as I calculate), when once this malodorous melancholy “Uncle Tommery” is got all well put by!  Which will take some time yet, I think.—­And so we will leave it.

I went to Germany last autumn; not seeking anything very definite; rather merely flying from certain troops of carpenters, painters, bricklayers, &c., &c., who had made a lodgment in this poor house; and have not even yet got their incalculable riot quite concluded.  Sorrow on them,—­and no return to these poor premises of mine till I have quite left!—­In Germany I found but little; and suffered, from six weeks of sleeplessness in German beds, &c., &c., a great deal.  Indeed I seem to myself never yet to have quite recovered.  The Rhine which I honestly ascended from Rotterdam to Frankfort was, as I now find, my chief Conquest the beautifulest river in the Earth, I do believe; and my first idea of a World-river.  It is many fathoms deep, broader twice over than the Thames here at high water; and rolls along, mirror-smooth (except that, in looking close, you will find ten thousand little eddies in it), voiceless, swift, with trim banks, through the heart of Europe, and of the Middle Ages wedded to the Present Age:  such an image of calm power (to say nothing of its other properties)