men-of-war, the trade encompassing the globe, the flag on which the sun
never sets,--when you look, above all, at that vast body of useful and
manly art, not directed, like the industry of France,--the industry of
vanity,--to making pier-glasses and air-balloons and gobelin tapestry and
mirrors, to arranging processions and chiselling silver and twisting gold
into filigrees, but to clothing the people, to the manufacture of woolen,
cotton, and linen cloth, of railroads and chain-cables and canals and
anchors and achromatic telescopes, and chronometers to keep the time at
sea,--when you think of the vast aggregate mass of their manufacturing and
mechanical production, which no statistics can ex-press, and to find a
market for which she is planting colonies under every constellation, and by
intimidation, by diplomacy, is knocking at the door of every market-house
upon the earth,--it is really difficult to restrain our admiration of such
a display of energy, labor, and genius, winning bloodless and innocent
triumphs everywhere, giving to the age we live in the name of the age of
the industry of the people. Now, the striking and the instructive fact is,
that exactly in that island workshop, by this very race of artisans, of
coal-heavers and woollen manufacturers of machinists and blacksmiths and
ship-carpenters, there has been produced and embodied forever, in words
that will outlast the mountains as well as the pyramids, a literature
which, take it for all in all, is the richest, most profound, most
instructive, combining more spirituality with more common sense, springing
from more capacious souls, conveying in better wisdom, more conformable to
the truth in man, in nature, and in human life, than the literature of any
nation that ever existed. That same race, side by side with the
unparalleled growth of its industry produces Shakspeare, Milton, Bacon, and
Newton, all four at the summit of human thought,--and then, just below
these unapproachable fixed lights, a whole firmament of glories, lesser
than they, as all created intelligence must be, yet in whose superior rays
the age of Augustus, of Leo X., of Louis XIV., all but the age of Pericles,