living present takes refuge. The glory of costly scrolls is dimmed by
the illustrated and typographical wonders which make the bookstore a
gorgeous dream. Knowledge, no longer rare, no longer lies in precarious
accumulations within the cells of some poor monk's crumbling brain, but
swells up like the ocean, universal and imperishable, pouring into the
vacant recesses of all minds as the ocean pours into the hollows under
its shore. To-day, newspapers multiplied by millions whiten the whole
country every morning, like the hoar-frost; and books, numerous and
brilliant as the stars, seem by a sort of astral influence to unseal the
latent destinies of many an intellect, as by their illumination they
stimulate thought and activity everywhere.

Once art seemed to have reached perfection in the pictures and
sculptures of Greece and Rome. Yet now those master-pieces are not only
equalled on canvas and in fresco, but reproduced by tens of thousands
from graven sheets of copper, steel, and even blocks of wood,--or, if
modelled in marble or bronze, are remodelled by hundreds, and set up in
countless households as the household gods. It is the glory of to-day
that the sun himself has come down to be the rival and teacher of
artists, to work wonders and perform miracles in art. He is the
celestial limner who shall preserve the authentic faces of every
generation from now until the world is no more. He holds the mirror up
to Nature, paralyzes the fleeting phantom, by chemical subtilty, on the
burnished plate,--and there it is fixed forever. He prepares the optical
illusion of the stereoscope, so that through tiny windows we may look as
into fairy-land and find sections of this magnificent world modelled in
miniature.

Once men imagined the earth to be a flat and limited tract. Now they
realize that it is a ponderous ball floating in infinite ether. Once