turnings of the hour-glass, for the conclusion of the lecture.
Therefore, by my control over light and darkness, I cause the dusk, and
then the starless night, to brood over the street; and summon forth again
the bellman, with his lantern casting a gleam about his footsteps, to
pace wearily from corner to corner, and shout drowsily the hour to drowsy
or dreaming ears. Happy are we, if for nothing else, yet because we did
not live in those days. In truth, when the first novelty and stir of
spirit had subsided,--when the new settlement, between the forest-border
and the sea, had become actually a little town,--its daily life must have
trudged onward with hardly anything to diversify and enliven it, while
also its rigidity could not fail to cause miserable distortions of the
moral nature. Such a life was sinister to the intellect, and sinister to
the heart; especially when one generation had bequeathed its religious
gloom, and the counterfeit of its religious ardor, to the next; for these
characteristics, as was inevitable, assumed the form both of hypocrisy
and exaggeration, by being inherited from the example and precept of
other human beings, and not from an original and spiritual source. The
sons and grandchildren of the first settlers were a race of lower and
narrower souls than their progenitors had been. The latter were stern,
severe, intolerant, but not superstitious, not even fanatical; and
endowed, if any men of that age were, with a far-seeing worldly sagacity.
But it was impossible for the succeeding race to grow up, in heaven's
freedom, beneath the discipline which their gloomy energy of character
had established; nor, it may be, have we even yet thrown off all the
unfavorable influences which, among many good ones, were bequeathed to us
by our Puritan forefathers. Let us thank God for having given us such
ancestors; and let each successive generation thank him, not less
fervently, for being one step further from them in the march of ages.

"What is all this?" cries the critic. "A sermon? If so, it is not in