There are certain hackneyed Thoughts that will force them-selves
on me; I find my mind, especially in hot weather, infested and
buzzed about by moral Platitudes. "That shows--" I say to
myself, or, "How true it is--" or, "I really ought to have
known!" The sight of a large clock sets me off into musings on
the flight of Time; a steamer on the Thames or lines of
telegraph inevitably suggest the benefits of Civilization, man's
triumph over Nature, the heroism of Inventors, the courage, amid
ridicule and poverty, of Stephenson and Watt. Like faint, rather
unpleasant smells, these thoughts lurk about railway stations. I
can hardly post a letter without marvelling at the excellence
and accuracy of the Postal System.

Then the pride in the British Constitution and British Freedom,
which comes over me when I see, even in the distance, the Towers
of Westminster Palace--that Mother of Parliaments--it is not
much comfort that this should be chastened, as I walk down the
Embankment, by the sight of Cleopatra's Needle, and the Thought
that it will no doubt witness the Fall of the British, as it has
that of other Empires, remaining to point its Moral, as old as
Egypt, to Antipodeans musing on the dilapidated bridges.

I am sometimes afraid of finding that there is a moral for
everything; that the whole great frame of the Universe has a key,
like a box; has been contrived and set going by a well-meaning
but humdrum Eighteenth-century Creator. It would be a kind of
Hell, surely, a world in which everything could be at once
explained, shown to be obvious and useful. I am sated with
Lesson and Allegory, weary of monitory ants, industrious bees,
and preaching animals. The benefits of Civilization cloy me. I