the hearth fire, and to the spark, a loveliness not their own.

With the unpublished desire to be envied, whereto here and there amongst
us is sacrificed the sky, abides the desire for an object of unconfessed
contempt. Both are contrary to that more authentic, that essential
solitariness wherein a few men have the grace to live, and wherein all
men are compelled to die. Both are unpublished even now, even in our
days, when it costs men so little to manifest the effrontery of their
opinions.

The difference between our worldliness and the New-worldliness is chiefly
that here we are apt to remove, by a little space, the distinction
brought about by riches, to put it back, to interpose, between it and our
actual life, a generation or two, an education or two. Obviously, it was
riches that made the class differences, if not now, then a little time
ago. Therefore the New England citizen should not be reproved by us for
anything except his too great candour. A social guide-book to some city
of the Republic is in my hands. I note how the very names of streets
take a sound of veneration or of cheerful derision from the writer's pen.
It is evident that the names are almost enough. They have an expression.
He is like a _naif_ teller of humorous anecdotes, who cannot keep his own
smiles in order till he have done.

This social writer has scorn, as an author should, and he wreaks it upon
parishes. He turns me a phrase with the northern end of a town and makes
an epigram of the southern. He caps a sarcasm with an address.

In truth, we too might write social guide-books to the same effect, had
we the same simplicity. It is to be thought that we too hold an address,
be it a good one, so closely that if Fortune should see fit to snatch it