The external, the immediate, the idiots of the moment, telling tales
that signify nothing, yet that so overcry the suggestion of our deeper
life as by the sad and weary to be mistaken for the discourse of life
itself,--these obtrude themselves upon us, and multiply and brag and
brawl about us, until we have neither room for better guests, nor
spirits for their entertainment. We are like schoolboys with eyes out at
the windows, drawn by some rattle of drum and squeak of fife, who would
study, were they but deaf. Reproach sleep as a waste, forsooth! It is
this tyrannical attraction to the surface, that indeed robs us of time,
and defrauds us of the uses of life. We cannot hear the gods for the
buzzing of flies. We are driven to an idle industry,--the idlest of all
things.

And to this description of loss men are nowadays peculiarly exposed.
The modern world is all battle-field; the smoke, the dust, the din fill
every eye and ear; and the hill-top of Lucretius, where is it? The
indispensable, terrible newspaper, with its late allies, the Titans and
sprites of steam and electricity,--bringing to each retired nook,
and thrusting in upon each otherwise peaceful household, the crimes,
follies, fears, solicitudes, doubts, problems of all kingdoms and
peoples,--exasperates the former Scotch mist of impressions into a
flooding rain, and almost threatens to swamp the brain of mankind. The
incitement to thought is ever greater; but the possibility of thinking,
especially of thinking in a deep, simple, central way, is ever less.
Problems multiply, but how to attend to them is ever a still greater
problem. Guests of the intellect and imagination accumulate until the
master of the house is pushed out of doors, and hospitality ceases from
the mere excess of its occasion. That must be a greater than Homer who
should now do Homer's work. He, there in his sweet, deep-skied Ionia,
privileged with an experience so simple and yet so salient and powerful,