imagination one must hold some shadowy simulacrum of the orator himself,
uttering his work. These conditions being fulfilled there remains for
application to the matter of the discourse too little attention to get
much good of it, and the total effect is confusion. Literature by which
the reader is compelled to bear in mind the producer and the
circumstances under which it was produced can be spared.




NATURA BENIGNA


It is not always on remote islands peopled with pagans that great
disasters occur, as memory witnesseth. Nor are the forces of nature
inadequate to production of a fiercer throe than any that we have known.
The situation is this: we are tied by the feet to a fragile shell
imperfectly confining a force powerful enough under favoring conditions,
to burst it asunder and set the fragments wallowing and grinding
together in liquid flame, in the blind fury of a readjustment. Nay, it
needs no such stupendous cataclysm to depeople this uneasy orb. Let but
a square mile be blown out of the bottom of the sea, or a great rift
open there. Is it to be supposed that we would be unaffected in the
altered conditions generated by a contest between the ocean and the
earth's molten core? These fatalities are not only possible but in the
highest degree probable. It is probable, indeed, that they have occurred
over and over again, effacing all the more highly organized forms of
life, and compelling the slow march of evolution to begin anew. Slow? On
the stage of Eternity the passing of races--the entrances and exits of
Life--are incidents in a brisk and lively drama, following one another