to preserve its qualities through all weathers.—­Thus it has happened, that not the Arch Fiend himself has been in my way, but these toils which tradition says were originally spun to obstruct him.  They are cobwebs and trifling obstacles in an earnest man’s path, it is true, and at length one even becomes attached to his unswept and undusted garret.  I love man—­kind, but I hate the institutions of the dead un-kind.  Men execute nothing so faithfully as the wills of the dead, to the last codicil and letter. They rule this world, and the living are but their executors.  Such foundation too have our lectures and our sermons, commonly.  They are all Dudleian; and piety derives its origin still from that exploit of pius Aeneas, who bore his father, Anchises, on his shoulders from the ruins of Troy.  Or rather, like some Indian tribes, we bear about with us the mouldering relics of our ancestors on our shoulders.  If, for instance, a man asserts the value of individual liberty over the merely political commonweal, his neighbor still tolerates him, that he who is living near him, sometimes even sustains him, but never the State.  Its officer, as a living man, may have human virtues and a thought in his brain, but as the tool of an institution, a jailer or constable it may be, he is not a whit superior to his prison key or his staff.  Herein is the tragedy; that men doing outrage to their proper natures, even those called wise and good, lend themselves to perform the office of inferior and brutal ones.  Hence come war and slavery in; and what else may not come in by this opening?  But certainly there are modes by which a man may put bread into his mouth which will not prejudice him as a companion and neighbor.

     “Now turn again, turn again, said the pinder,
     For a wrong way you have gone,
     For you have forsaken the king’s highway,
     And made a path over the corn.”

Undoubtedly, countless reforms are called for, because society is not animated, or instinct enough with life, but in the condition of some snakes which I have seen in early spring, with alternate portions of their bodies torpid and flexible, so that they could wriggle neither way.  All men are partially buried in the grave of custom, and of some we see only the crown of the head above ground.  Better are the physically dead, for they more lively rot.  Even virtue is no longer such if it be stagnant.  A man’s life should be constantly as fresh as this river.  It should be the same channel, but a new water every instant.

               “Virtues as rivers pass,
     But still remains that virtuous man there was.”