palsied feelers of recognition into the ocean of God's universe, just as
languid as the aforesaid Hindoo's hold upon the Kalpas of emptiness
underneath the turtle?

Joe Scofield sowed the fields and truck-patch,--sold the crops down in
Wheeling; every year he got some little, hardly earned snugness for the
house (he and Bone had been born in it, their grandfathers had lived
there together). Bone was his slave; of course, they thought, how should
it be otherwise? The old man's daughter was Dode Scofield; his negro was
Bone Scofield, in degree. Joe went to the Methodist church on Sundays;
he hurrahed for the Democratic candidate: it was a necessity for Whigs
to be defeated; it was a necessity for Papists to go to hell. He had a
tight grip on these truths, which were born, one might say, with his
blood; his life grew out of them. So much of the world was certain,--but
outside? It was rather vague there: Yankeedom was a mean-soiled country,
whence came clocks, teachers, peddlers, and infidelity; and the
English,--it was an American's birthright to jeer at the English.

We call this a narrow life, prate in the North of our sympathy with the
universal man, don't we? And so we extend a stomachic greeting to our
Spanish brother that sends us wine, and a bow from our organ of ideality
to Italy for beauty incarnate in Art,--see the Georgian slaveholder only
through the eyes of the cowed negro at his feet, and give a dime on
Sunday to send the gospel to the heathen, who will burn forever, we
think, if it never is preached to them. What of your sympathy with the
universal man, when I tell you Scofield was a Rebel?

His syllogisms on this point were clear, to himself. For slavery to
exist in a country where free government was put on trial was a tangible
lie, that had worked a moral divorce between North and South. Slavery